My Review: Sacred Legion - The Higher Unknown

 Sacred Legion - The Higher Unknown

There are swaddled stars, afraid to feel pain, deliberately slowing the thought of death to prefer the silence of those gagged. When they turn into songs then everything sinks into the precipice of sonic paths, of elegant and malignant traps that use the class of hot metal.

The band from the Frosinone area returns for a record that kills this silly attitude of considering it gothic, Death Rock-loving and similar amenity when, instead, the trio makes itself the spokesperson for a conspicuous transformation.

It becomes an American comic strip with steps in Europe, as the children of Dino Battaglia, Georg Büchner, E.T.A. Hoffman, for talking clouds that, while moving very fast for only twenty-nine minutes, manage to fix an almost violent drag backwards: we find ourselves in the 1800s, with resounding anachronistic moves that obtund, skim over current events and choose the music that ferries everything onto a hypothetical sheet of paper. 

And we find Dino Buzzati and his Desert of the Tartars: the passage of time, destiny, the absurdity of blocked and shocked existentialism find their fixation in these compositions that lacerate the naive propensity for victimhood or pessimism. Rather, we are faced with a ponderation, a discipline of thought that finds support in Zeena Schreck, the true golden nugget of this bundle of compositions. A goddess who knows the spiritual path, the sensible theatricality that blends well with the music of the three, for a desecrating fit full of rust. 

And it is here that Giovanni Drogo appears in the verses in an unconscious manner, but with a precise sense of duty and obedience: these are songs that need patterns, study, a behavioural regime in which the need to give brevity the task of clarifying everything makes them ancient, almost punk, but certainly not gothic. And it is here that things become clear: the shores of those places where crying and feeling unfortunate made souls vulnerable are dead. Fabiano Gagliano rewrites the rules, draws comics, searches for Desert Rock more in the nocturnal dust of early seventies hard rock, which are certainly present, but there is no denying how in the poignancy there is a sonic simplicity that needs no tricks or flames: the sound moves in a single direction without deception, grating nicely on the thousands of bands that waste time searching for an effect deemed ‘right’.

In the album, the floor of notes becomes a howl, a howl, an echo devoid of pomposity as it is invested with a precise responsibility: to be a human and not a mechanical whole.

Songs like splashes of blood, of memories, of detected lies, of precise invitations that shock for their loyalty and depth.

I mentioned Dino Battaglia, and specifically that resounding revival of Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.

Well: these songs take up the trait of a fear that seeks separation from the nightmare in order to have a lonely course, to rage in the pleasure of attitudinal distortions (which are evident here in the grooves) and conclude in a genuflection with big drops of humility through a historical element that the Old Scribe refuses to define as a cover.

Instead, I would say that the song that concludes this second disc is a new switch, logical and sensible, to define not only a love, a good taste, but rather an opening and closing of a temporal circle in which the group rests its creatures within this historic song

Mirko, Tony and Fabiano take rock and put it upside down, not in a cave but in the hemisphere of a filigree that seeks continuous expansion. Scratching guitars, digging bass and drowning drums make the whole thing a nightmare, yes, but sustainable and compatible with the stage geometry of these nine splinters.

The whole must be fast, focused, in a rhythmic condensation in which the only escapes are given by two strategic moves: the recall of two travelling companions from the time that was and a song (well, it's not a coincidence that it's the shortest ...) that opens, and closes in a certain sense, every possible desire to go elsewhere. Sonic, spiritual art, that looks at tradition with respect, a notebook in hand and a pen to take notes. Nothing technological in this work, but rather a plow that digs among the clods muddy by existences madly lost. And then bonfires, witches, dissected souls, saving tears and aspirations as vectors of a well-being that knows the benefit of the doubt. If Satan exists in the verses of Black Sabbath (who I would not cite as the masters of this album, but only as a sacred temple to quickly turn your gaze to), here we find him in the reluctance of the from Frosinone to use the shadow zone to become obligatorily gothic. There is nothing gothic instead, but definitely an attitude to creativity that has only one obvious term of comparison in this work: the Damned, who made up their own stylistic citizenship without asking themselves any questions. The three are free to go wild, to cover their ears, to perform a zonal marking on the rhythm and on the historic psychedelic stripes of that crazy combo that turns out to be the work of the guitars and the bass, which, like nocturnal diviners, immediately bury what they have found.

A sound concept album, either for the attention to sound that must be an investigator, or for the frankness of an emotional framework that however connects to a mental universe made up of years and years of specific studies. Here is the trajectory of the songs becoming indifferent to the current condition. No photography, no evocative presumption, but a lateral look towards a non-world where the stories told are already intuitable from the chords and their short successions, in a clash that certainly makes them, nowadays, unique, without seeking uniqueness...

If an echo dies (the fifth piece of this artistic/human project), what is reborn is the choice, full of good taste, of not being ashamed of the limits of the present, of the approach distorted by no longer being musicians and writers of simple lyrics but connected to depth.

A bundle of the whole compressed into languid rebellious wounds, oxygenated by practicality and not by dreams: a powerful leap towards an evident sarcasm, a crowbar that uncovers boredom and kills it.

We were talking about two presences that make it all a generous Thank You from the three musicians and composers: Adolphe Le Duc and Matteo Bracaglia who are anything but last-minute repechages; they are flowers that fall skillfully between the furrows to cleanse, perfume and enlarge this emotional crater that makes respect a curve where, at the end of its trajectory, there is a sensorial embrace. Stoner Rock and the aforementioned Desert Rock (which are nothing but the elegant splinters of that Birmingham and London that between 1969 and 1972 would have landed in the USA like a relentless plague) are the primitive and most obvious stylistic suspects but then, like the wind that has no masters, the stylistic territories know rapid deviations, in a theatre that, more than pain, is a container full of slime, heavy distortions, even pop lightness as in the final track, in which we arrive at a miracle: on one side the band that wrote this pop pill soaked in glam feathers and on the other that alternative indie attitude that was the territory of the Pixies in their first steps.

References, stretching, for a muscular and elusive record. Above the Frosinone area there is a miracle that is going back in time to create an extraordinary event that will certainly not have a filiation: and it is in this uniqueness that an honest prodigy reveals itself…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

13-2-2025

https://batcaveproductions.bandcamp.com/album/the-higher-unknown

La mia Recensione: Sacred Legion - The Higher Unknown

 

Sacred Legion - The Higher Unknown

Ci sono stelle fasciate, timorose di provar dolore, che rallentano volutamente il pensiero della morte per preferire il silenzio di quelli imbavagliati. Quando si trasformano in canzoni allora tutto affonda nel precipizio di sentieri sonori, di trappole eleganti e maligne che adoperano la classe dei metalli roventi.

Torna la band del circondario di Frosinone per un disco che uccide questa sciocca attitudine a considerarla gotica, amante del Death Rock e amenità simili quando, invece, il terzetto si fa portavoce di una vistosa trasformazione.

Diventa un fumetto americano con i passi in Europa, come figli di Dino Battaglia, di Georg Büchner, di E.T.A. Hoffman, per delle nuvole parlanti che, pur muovendosi velocissime per soli ventinove minuti, riescono a fissare un quasi violento trascinamento all’indietro: ci si ritrova nell’800, con strepitose mosse anacronistiche che ottundono, scremano l’attualità e scelgono la musica che traghetti il tutto su un ipotetico foglio di carta. 

E troviamo Dino Buzzati e il suo Deserto dei Tartari: il passaggio del tempo, il destino, l’assurdità dell’esistenzialismo bloccato e scioccato trovano il loro fissativo in queste composizioni che lacerano l’ingenua propensione al vittimismo o al pessimismo. Siamo, piuttosto, davanti a una ponderazione, a una disciplina di pensiero che trova il supporto di Zeena Schreck, vera pepita d’oro di questo fascio di composizioni. Una dea che conosce il percorso spirituale, la sensata teatralità che ben si sposa con le musiche dei tre, per un incastro dissacrante pieno di ruggine. 

Ed ecco che Giovanni Drogo appare nei versi in modo inconsapevole, ma con un senso preciso del dovere e dell’obbedienza: sono brani che hanno bisogno di schemi, di studio, di un regime comportamentale in cui la necessità di conferire alla brevità il compito di precisare il tutto li rende antichi, quasi punk, ma non gotici di certo. Ed è qui che le cose si fanno chiare: sono morte le rive di quei luoghi dove piangere e sentirsi sfortunati rendeva vulnerabili le anime. Fabiano Gagliano riscrive le regole, disegna fumetti, cerca il Desert Rock più nella polvere notturna dell’hard rock dei primi anni Settanta che sicuramente sono presenti, ma non si può negare come nello struggimento esista una semplicità sonora che non abbisogna di trucchi e fiamme: il suono si muove in una direzione unica senza inganni, grattugiando benissimo le migliaia di band che perdono tempo a cercare un effetto ritenuto “giusto”.

Nell’album il pavimento delle note diventa latrato, ululato, un eco privo di pomposità in quanto investito di una precisa responsabilità: essere un tutto umano e non meccanico.

Canzoni come schizzi di sangue, di memorie, di bugie rilevate, di inviti precisi che sgomentano per lealtà e profondità.

Accennavo a Dino Battaglia, e precisamente a quel clamoroso riproponimento de “Il cuore Rivelatore”, di Edgar Allan Poe.

Bene: queste canzoni riprendono il tratto di una paura che cerca la separazione dall’incubo per avere una rotta solitaria, per infierire nel piacere di distorsioni attitudinali (che qui sono evidenti nei solchi) e concludere in una genuflessione con grandi gocce di umiltà attraverso un elemento storico che il Vecchio Scriba si rifiuta di definire come una cover.

Direi che, invece, il brano che conclude questo secondo disco sia un nuovo interruttore, logico e sensato, per definire non solo un amore, un buon gusto, quanto piuttosto un aprire e chiudere un cerchio temporale nel quale il gruppo appoggia le proprie creature all’interno di questa storica canzone…

Mirko, Tony e Fabiano prendono il rock e lo mettono a testa in giù, non in una grotta bensì nell’emisfero di una filigrana che cerca una espansione continua. Chitarre graffianti, il basso che scava e la batteria che fa annegare il fiato di una danza rendono il tutto un incubo, sì, ma sostenibile e compatibile con la geometria scenica di queste nove schegge.

L’insieme deve essere rapido, focalizzato, in una condensa ritmica in cui le uniche evasioni sono date da due mosse strategiche: il richiamare due compagni di viaggio del tempo che fu e un brano (toh, mica un caso che sia il più breve…) che apre, e chiude in un certo senso, ogni possibile volontà di andare altrove.

Arte sonica, spirituale, che guarda alla tradizione con rispetto, un quaderno in mano e una penna a china per prendere appunti. Nulla di tecnologico in questo lavoro, bensì un aratro che scava tra le zolle infangate da esistenze follemente perdute. E allora roghi, streghe, anime sezionate, lacrime salvifiche e aspirazioni come vettori di un benessere che conosce il beneficio del dubbio.

Se Satana esiste nei versi dei Black Sabbath (che non citerei come i maestri di questo album, ma solamente come un sacro tempio a cui volgere velocemente lo sguardo), qui lo ritroviamo nella ritrosia della formazione Frusinate ad adoperare la zona dell’ombra per divenire obbligatoriamente gotici. Non c’è nulla di gotico invece, ma decisamente un'attitudine alla creatività che ha un solo evidente termine di paragone in questo lavoro: i Damned, che truccavano la loro stessa cittadinanza stilistica senza porsi problemi. I tre sono liberi di folleggiare, di tapparsi le orecchie, di compiere un marcamento a zona sul ritmo e sulle storiche strisce psichedeliche di quel combo pazzesco che risulta essere il lavoro delle chitarre e del basso, che, come rabdomanti notturni, seppelliscono immediatamente quello che hanno trovato.

Un concept album sonoro, vuoi per l’attenzione nei confronti del suono che deve essere un indagatore, vuoi per la schiettezza di un’impalcatura emotiva che però si connette a un universo mentale fatto di anni e anni di studi specifici. Ecco la traiettoria delle canzoni divenire menefreghista nei confronti della condizione attuale. Nessuna fotografia, nessuna presunzione evocativa, ma uno sguardo laterale verso un non mondo dove le storie raccontate sono già intuibili dagli accordi e dalle loro brevi successioni, in uno scontro che li rende sicuramente, al giorno d’oggi, unici, senza cercare l’unicità…

Se muore un eco (il quinto pezzo di questo progetto artistico/umano), quello che rinasce è la scelta, piena di buon gusto, di non vergognarsi dei limiti del presente, dell’approccio falsato dal non essere più dei musicisti e degli scrittori di testi semplici ma connessi alla profondità. 

Un fascio di insieme compresso in languide ferite ribelli, ossigenate dalla praticità e non dal sogno: uno scatto poderoso verso un sarcasmo evidente, un grimaldello che scoperchia la noia e la uccide.

Dicevamo di due presenze che rendono il tutto un generoso Grazie da parte dei tre musicisti e compositori: Adolphe Le Duc e Matteo Bracaglia che tutto sono tranne che dei ripescaggi in zona Cesarini; sono fiori che cadono con abilità tra i solchi per detergere, profumare e ingigantire questo cratere emozionale che fa del rispetto una curva dove, alla fine della sua traiettoria, esiste un abbraccio sensoriale.

Lo Stoner Rock e il già citato Desert Rock (che altro non sono che le schegge eleganti di quella Birmingham e di quella Londra che tra il 1969 e il 1972 sarebbero approdate negli USA come un flagello senza sosta) sono gli indiziati stilistici primitivi e più evidenti ma poi, come il vento che non ha padroni, ecco che i territori stilistici conoscono rapide deviazioni, in un teatro che, più che di dolore, è un recipiente pieno di melma, di distorsioni grevi, di leggerezza addirittura pop come nel brano finale, in cui approdiamo a un miracolo: da una parte la band che scrisse questa pillola pop imbevuta di piume glam e dall’altra quell’attitudine alternative indie che fu territorio dei Pixies nei loro primi passi.

Rimandi, stretching, per un disco muscolare e sfuggente. Sopra il Frusinate esiste un miracolo che sta tornando indietro nel tempo per creare un evento straordinario che non avrà di certo una filiazione: ed è in questa unicità che si palesa un portento onesto…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

13-2-2025

https://batcaveproductions.bandcamp.com/album/the-higher-unknown

  

My Review: Mogwai - The Bad Fire

 

Mogwai - The Bad Fire

A desert finds its source in the sonic bridge of a time spent leaving traces of vibrations in the hope of a landing place, where getting lost and finding oneself is but a beginning.

It was 1995 and everything was falling apart, in the middle heart of a decade in which beauty and ugliness were convincing without osmosis, without megaphones and without silences at the same time.

A couple of Scottish friends chose an epitaph as a sprint, a flash to be extinguished by research, theoretical, on how sound could be enslaved by the beauty of rhythmics and harmonies in search of a parasol. They have always rejected the definition of a Post-Rock band, of pioneers of that genre, and they have done well: if you spend time with the wrong ones, seizing the moment is practically impossible.

The new album does not celebrate 30 years of their career, but rather starts with cycles of chemotherapy of a young daughter.

Nothing artistic but the desire to silence a frustration, a pain, a neurotic avalanche of expanding explosions. Dowsing songs are born, emotions that become expedients, the harmonic rustle of a strange series of conversions, here elevated to the emotional carpet that leaves burrs and flowers overweight, because this work narrates, explains, brings happiness to life through temporal and educational seasons, in a jolt calculated to anaesthetise fears and useless tensions.

The band's intuitions, balustrade and strong moral, since the days of pompous Brit-Pop, have built in the sonic garden of these fingertips a series of intentions that in The Bad Fire find a new resource: to create not only cinematic flows, sound fables and the possibility that imagination has no gags, but rather baggage and handholds, in a story that specifies how the human soul is the first of the planets. The choice of misleading titles (always an attitude that appeared as a desecrating act not to make the pieces a serious thing), reaffirms the concept that in this unique, almost purely instrumental mode live words, thoughts, impulses, brakes and the sparkle of a beam that, between noise and sweetness, defines understanding as a fortuitous gesture and not as a sum of capacities.

A hymn to joy, one to the consecration of the mood that must be taken seriously as adults, one to the pressure of mutant spaces, and yet always with an innovative and surprising willingness to allow joy to tread these grooves. And it is pop, rock, dream pop, alternative, psychedelia, but above all a serious game that searches for the sky and slaps it down with some textures where electronics is by no means an icy thermometer, but rather a new way of generating warmth. 

Diversified approaches, instruments used as a melting pot to which new instructions can be given, to generate intoxicating layers where it is not the journey that counts, but remaining anchored in one's own emotional territory.

One loses oneself in these flights, in these voids, in these jumps and in these frictions, to compose unshakable dreams, doubts and certainties, not to flee but to encounter a world free of syllables and sterile and useless approximations.

Here come Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, Television and an impressive series of bald notes, without burrs, without presumptions: the sound (father/master and servant) is this time only the splinter that leaves more pleasure than pain, offers the idea that in the uncertainty of meaning those musical bundles find a cosy bed.

Stuart and Barry have never written songs: they have sought refuge where precisely Post-Rock has placed barriers, stakes and stylistic and attitudinal boundaries. The two are intelligent souls, privateers of the unknown who seek out followers and on the backs of their scores leave the dew of these notes stuttering but never waning, never falling, always, instead, in an ascending flight. What is torpid the two disinfect it, giving the other two members a free garden in which to drop duty and seek a game where hypothesis is never a sterile blotting paper.

Here's My Bloody Valentine and the shoegaze period from 1991 to 1993 offer the Scottish band some trails to follow, with more sadness and nastiness...

There is no pressure, much less conditioning in these streams: music as open windows in the middle of a meadow with no houses, to establish a pact that transcends limits, to produce, as a primary objective, a series of songs that are the words, the gestures, the steps that go round and round in the grooves of a vinyl record that then rises up and leaves everyone without a foothold. Poetry? No! It is definitely an attempt to celebrate a new behavioural vocabulary, in which the disregard for time, art and the obligatory can be anaesthetised. Notes as drops under glass, voices as silent solos without the need for beautiful singing.

Perhaps these roads that invoke an imminent emotional perspective can also bring about a suspension of that sand that in the hourglass only knows gravity. Mogwai create a science-fiction epic, hydrating the habits of experiencing listening as enclosures and finally determining an ordeal that knows how to show rays of sunshine and rainbows on a festive day.

Organs, pianos, harpsichords, mellotrons: these are instruments that are discreetly positioned in the flows, never protagonists but rather gregarious in a complexity that, track after track, manages to make its way into comprehension. But there are others, because in the clamorous work of production it was decided to make the grafts subtle, leaving the solos the task of not being redundant, but the first pupils of a timid respect for an ordered puzzle conceived to leave the ears disoriented in the belly of a flight. There are no signs of tension, of awkwardness, of discord: does that seem little?

They are the directors of an avant-garde that, when free of the desire for useless definitions, will be able to indicate new strategies. The 90s, after all, were an infection for them and, in this new millennium, anything that allows for temporal jumps, between kangaroos and shrimps, can establish the effectiveness of a pleasant confusion that makes the mind a colourful ivy...

The basses are at times unfocused, the guitars often take on the guise of stunned keyboards, the drumming often seems to anticipate: yes, there are glaring errors on the album, on a technical level, not everything fits together perfectly and it is precisely this element that makes it an analogue record in the time of digital, leaving imprecision a wonderful sceptre.

There are no dreams in the tracks, no screams, no exaggerations: everything appears as a village in flight with no intention of taking up residence, a walking with curiosity to precede consciousness.

The time has come to look these compositions in the face and give them a dagger lined with grace, slow and sensual, where they can kiss this hill of running petals...

Song by Song

1 - God Gets You Back

A synth opens the sky, sounds like a restrained delirium, a slowness with the feeling that a speed is imminent and contagious. But it is in this loop that strings of guitars are deposited with a restrained reverb to hold the tension like a switch that explains, from the outset, what will be illuminated in the continuation. When the drumming decides to present the bill to the awkward primordial beauty, one realises how the Scottish band has found an orange oil in the veins of intuition. Hypnosis and delirium...

2 - Hi Chaos

We were talking about mistakes, about non-synchronicity, and here we are faced with one of those moments: where there is a space revealed and not hidden, the sky gods spread smiles. What happens in the second track? We enter into the fullness of the album's title which, in Scotland, means Hell. We meet it, then, in its earthquakes, in its exaltations, in the lanes of thunderstorms and of a chaos to which, like a mantra to which one would like to say no, one entrusts one's pleasure, with the final part of the song teaching how Post-Rock with Mogwai is a sterile and repetitive exercise. Here they play with fire that slows and beats, for it is in slowness that pain finds its perfect throne. The final guitars and bass drive the effects back into a beautiful bath of humility, leaving the song in its disarming perfection...

3 - What Kind of Mix is This?

The introduction (a celestial mantra celebrating Television's second album as they take a walk with Cardiacs) resembles a distorted chain looking for a void to fall into: minimalist until the feet reveal how the pedalboard is just a game to create quality and not hide technical limitations... Here, then, is a swinging hiss that is embraced by silk sticks and fingers that produce wonderful toxins on a bass keyboard...

4 - Fanzine Made Of Flesh

Mogwai are punk, totally punk, punk without identity, madmen without strategy, painters who paint nothingness. 

And when they speak, when they sing, when they are melodic vocals over a distorted, deserted bass, then you understand how the talent to invite a pop refrain to show its skin is nothing more than the centre of gravity of that furious musical and cultural genre...

5 - Pale Vegan Hip Pain

Minimalism, fear that seeks a caress, a tear that doesn't want to die, a winter that fears the sun's spring rays: these are the protagonists of this ballad so close to prayer, for a brilliant thermal condition that seems to land in the confines of Kurosawa, on an evening when the cinema could be the only closet in which to hide. The track starts out slow, proceeds in the same way, but performs a crazy miracle: when the cluster of guitar notes seeks descent, here is the synth, with mammoth sweetness, accompanying this trail of water to the edges of a compelling, enveloping sadness…

6 - If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some Of The Others

You try to relax, in these seven minutes, in which everything sounds like a thesis of a drama searching for wings. Instead: Mogwai prefer tension, they remove the protection from the emotional cables and keep them in a bain-marie, here suspense is an old trick but still capable of conveying consciousness and trembling. A tale, a journey where the instruments experience the intensity of bubbles held by the hair...

7 - 18 Volcanoes

The ignorant always stop at precipitation, at definition without patience. Here is a perfect example: in the first few seconds a foolish multitude might think of a combination of Sonic Youth and Marlene Kuntz. But the band plays at recapturing the magic of krautrock without photocopying it, throwing themselves into the circle of respect for the most hypnotic Beatles to the point of kissing the Velvet Underground with these driven, magnetic distortions. 

The last few minutes are a sonic cry, slowing down the beats by sedating the will of the bass and drums to be the architects of deflagrating surprises. And yes, there is a crescendo, but with simply perfect reins...

8 - Hammer Room

Let there be a rainbow, an afternoon party in a valley crowded with peace and beautiful dreams. Baroque music lends its flank, but then this combo throws itself on the petals kneaded with reflections and everything becomes modern, even more effervescent to the point of allowing the snare drums to direct the sounds towards a robotics that seems to create the right pause in this album that never ceases to confirm and surprise. The guitar solos are minimalist, precise, without smearing of unnecessary excess effects, and when the sound becomes a syringe, the party is over...

9 - Lion Rumpus

Again light, wind, lightness, with the seventies prog children longing for contact. The only track where the lead guitar searches for the bull's eye, but careful listening reveals how the synchronisation of time-space leads the impression to become a certainty: the band has found a perfect excuse to give a short song a feeling of eternity

10 - Fact Boy

There's no two without three: the album ends with a parade of lights, of rolls that bless the melody and structure of a prolonged sound that seeks celestial ascent. The rock here sweeps, wanting no footholds, wrestling with the stop-and-go at the slightest end, to leave these continuous snares the benefit that the metrics can also be a distorted impression. And it concludes in a colourful jaunt with the hope that all the grim but not serious moments of this jewel can generate the memory of a period that does not feed memory to find awareness...

   Stuart Braithwaite (Guitar, Vocals)

Barry Burns (Guitar, Piano, Synthesizer, Vocals)

Dominic Aitchison (Bass Guitar)

Martin Bulloch (Drums)

Producer: John Congleton

Label: Rock Action

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

25th January 2025