My Review: The Neuro Farm - Ghosts

 

The Neuro Farm - Ghosts

Rebekah Feng - Vocals, electric violin

Brian S. Wolff - Vocals and guitar

Tim Phillips - Keyboards and sound-design

DreamrD - Drums and percussion

Absence, distance and lack can't be touched but they (The Neuro Farm) do it perfectly, reaching out to shake the soul.

Which in this case is unquestionably lost.

And to simplify it, one could call the characters that gravitate within these seven tracks by the American band ghosts.

Delirious, suffocating beauty, in conjunction with magnetic arrows capable of generating a sense of imprisonment and liberation, in the play of an oxymoron that makes the nourishment of emotional paralysis worthwhile.

The influences, evident and viral, lead us into the paths of artists such as Chelsea Wolfe, Midnight Juggernauts, Tori Amos, Nine Inch Nails, Pj Harvey, Cranes and many others, but with this quartet what stuns is not the evocation but the invasion, the one that obtunds, unveils, emphasises the right to probe multiple aptitudes that you will not find in the list of artists mentioned above. In the emotional chaos, beauty emerges as a survivor whose interlocutor is a ghost and her blood brothers, in an imperfect place to be afraid of not keeping the balance, in which stability is an impediment. Music for the psyche, for streams that lose consciousness and burble, humming continuously like a sweet poem full of sinister tricks and textures: the sweetness seems to be feigned, only to reveal itself instead as the basis of a generous fruit that, through the choice of contrasting musical genres, generates the liberation for a sweaty but satisfied madness. Time, in these seven compositions, disturbs, provokes, soothes, disinfects and plants the flag at the crossroads of spiritual ascents and descents that have no end...

Everything is thrown on the contours of a mirror, cosy, untiring, to give the multiplicity of hooks between electric violin and crusted guitar a sense of annexation that is formidable.

The quirks become clothes, the notes a primary afflatus, the rhythm changes the square that disorientates and rages, in the corollary of a series of familiar tremors. In this, All About Eve are precisely the parents of such inclinations. 

Released on the 10th of June 2014, this sublime work displays the scratches of a darkwave devoid of self-quotations, with the gloom reaching into alternative, art pop and early 70s scratchy cabaret. The vocal harmonies (very different between Rebekah's and Brian's), are dark but mystical, mysterious, like plungers on a pentagram that sounds like a ball of silk on a dark night.

The epicness is always controlled until the refrains offer a chance for majestic grandeur, yet the elegant fairies do not open their lips much, as if the sumptuousness could be perceived rather than heard...

One has the feeling that compared to the debut work, Ghosts, it is a slow missive that, while scratching a lot, retains the grace and respect for their own future. But, clearly, speaking of ghosts (better, I repeat, of lost souls), this project is a didactic system to make memory, fear, experience a lifesaver that can stop generating confrontations.

Pills, gratings, fans, stings in amniotic liquids often inebriated and never reassured: this is the real value of such complexities. Drama is an alarm and not a capricious defence: just think of how all the guitars align themselves with both rhythm and circular melodic expansion, while the violin becomes the summary of a hive of young sirens...

The loss of orientation, in the presence of ghosts, in the magnetic magma of these compositions, presents us with the aforementioned spirits as predecessors and witnesses of witticisms and strategies, because each song is a butterfly that with its flight carries away a room of one's own mind...

Let us now visit, slowly and devotedly, all these seven magnetic footsteps...

Song by Song

1 - Black Wings

The opening is a condensation of atmospheres, with the guitar riff folded in on itself, in a mastodontic darkness, and Rebekah's singing that takes us to the first ep by the Cranes and that singer capable of making the sky a continuous thunderstorm...

The stylistic code is given by the apparent darkwave mobility, but the violin solo, a diamond of malignant beauty, summons us to the theatre for cabaret spurts and medieval monologues. Austere, violent, a weed to open the consciousness of unpleasant encounters...

2 - Paralysis

Often hypnosis is a magnet without control, through beats that seem to insist and combine with subtle textures of warped and deforming synths, with the melancholic violin that clings to Brian's voice, but with the crazy surprise of a long wait before the second verse: the main structure remains, but the voice seems to disappear and the guitars and violin dance in the recesses of the semi-darkness. Then the reset and the chanting becomes an orgasmic go-ahead that makes the paralysis of the title the only discipline in front of the whole...

A complex, liturgical track, permeated especially in the finale with a tension that dries the breath…

3 - Skeletons

A post-punk lullaby the likes of which has not been heard in quite some time, with, in the refrain, a sonic mixture that prevents the rhythm from being pleasant, a spectacular and intentional disturbance to then resume with the arpeggio, the singing and the preceding drumming that linearity that perhaps creates less of a problem for the listener. Everything is governed by melancholic desires, with programmed flights given by arpeggios and bass altos to make the track a suppository that wants to lean on the nightmare that lives in its grooves. The violin goes to make the words die and the tears seem like a liberating thank you...

4 - Submission

The hypnosis of Trip-Hop in search of furtive gothic dives settles in the excited drumming and in a stuttering guitar between echoes and distortions calibrated with drops of wah wah. 

Brian in the refrain touches the borders of two historical stalagmites of the 70s: John Foxx and Stan Ridgway and it is hypnosis and weeping, unquestionable and inevitable...

The lyrics emphasise and the music escapes, the singing perceives the whole and the song becomes the funeral of every hoped-for calm...

5 - Falling

In the early 2000s, gothic ballads involved arpeggios and the inclusion of small solos to weld the belief that even this could reach the masses. These guys, on the other hand, distribute novelty and annoyance with syncopated drumming that sweeps the cards, while in the finale the singing recedes, is almost hidden, and a guitar full of water drowns out the sound only to return with a lacerating circular hiss

6 - Underground

The penultimate episode is the summa of a slow and scratchy ordeal, with the lyrics recounting the obscure everyday life, giving inspiration the role of terrifying. Then its slow tension looks defiantly at the sky while the guitar, robotic but never static, takes on the burden of thickening the drama.

7 - Resolution

The end sees the expulsion of the voices from the stage, entrusting to the plots, interwoven with suspense and melancholy, the task of immersing us in a strangely clean, positive air, with the synths that suspend the path previously taken to exalt the disappearance of the ghosts... An ending that smells of an epilogue in which the most unpleasant feelings rest and the dream of a more serene access to the future can at least have a chance...

Epic, sinuous, it creeps in like a weed whose possession cannot but generate a bloody pleasure...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

15th June 2025

https://theneurofarm.bandcamp.com/album/ghosts

My Review: God in a Black Suit - Thresholds

 

God in a Black Suit - Thresholds

There is an ancient perspective, rooted in autumnal paths, that sustains and pushes memory to be a fertiliser of time. And there are places that have the exact, intense, pure skin to sustain this. Matera is a rock that lives high up, not by the sea but by the clouds, capable of nourishing, generation after generation, people and artists devoted to coming out of those places. A perfect band to make it all clear is the protagonist of its second episode, after the eponymous debut album, here in a total and embarrassing state of grace: to be able to make their compositions sound like angelic flights of distant stratagems is truly a miracle, one that makes Italian music truly fortunate.

The formation, so seemingly distant from Basilicata, with these tracks instead cushions the pain of the desire to take possession of dreams that move it and takes flight, entering, specifically, into a sensory mutation in the way the songs are conceived, structured and finalised. An evident growth, which materialises their impetus, in a sort of forced education in order to achieve a status quo where sound can reign, initiate and structure these melancholic humoral folds in search of light. A race into the old zones of a Germany that in the mid-1970s was already creating crossovers, to make purity only a dress, but not the core of artistic inclination.

The Materana band makes people jump, induces memory to become fertiliser and cure, a dance floor of the soul with the need for nocturnal seeds. What remains of this line-up is the desire not to be encompassed in the gothic ghetto, especially the Italian one, as (clearly) all compositions are glimpses, listenings, dynamics of dreams that aim to fix well-being and meaning not in a precise genre, but in a zone where everything is fluctuating and not rigid. 

Undoubtedly streams of magnetic post-punk sprout and stun, but it is never definitive, let alone overpowering. Thus, precious metals are found in the stones of the group, five painters of fairy tales with the intention of making bodies vibrate but, above all, of sowing tension, sweetness, to make the whole a more complex perimeter than it might seem at a quick listen.

No, take it easy: with God in a Black Suit you have to be slow, devoted to patience, feel their nomadism enter desert rock, as well as post-rock, even touching on little-known 1970s American psychedelia.

If you practice it, you will notice how the band always gives the impression of isolating each individual instrument in order to direct it towards personal exaltation.

Annalisa Laterza's bass guitar is sandpaper, a heavy guillotine with twisting sides, capable of sending notes to the belly.

Bruno Pantone, guitar and lyrics, is a fakir, an elegant trapeze artist who draws traces in the sky, holding in his fingertips a long trail of masters to whom he does not bow, offering, instead, complex plots that are at the same time as simple as a breath.

Gianluca Natrella seems to arrive from Boston, on a day when boredom is to be surrounded with metric kindness, but also with that strength that structures the pleasure of sustaining time through his deadly drumsticks.

Matteo Demma, vocals and lyrics, is an anachronistic elf, his voice shifting between terroristic and cautious registers, between whispers and guttural tombstones.

Finally, Pietro De Ruggieri, with his synthetic carpets, succeeds in compacting the torrent of neurotic impulses with majestic elegance: you might think he is often absent, but instead he is there to hinge it all.

A continuous hypnosis of ancient shadows and modern lights, with nerves that brush against loyalty, break it down and flee, like angels without fears. When they pick up the pace, you can almost feel the existential itch, the loneliness and anxiety searching for oxygen, images and places on which to breathe a refined sonority. The lyrics, written by four hands, are a mapping out of this sound brick and cylinder that knows how to get the tactics right too: the set list is perfect in that there is not the age-old problem of alternating slower songs with faster ones, but the will to make tension a way, a goal, a stubbornness that makes this line-up truly unique on the Italian scene.

The interplay of voices, the countermelody with the female one, the solos placed at strategic points of the album make us realise the breadth of their imagery. A volumetric, eclectic tapestry with innovative audacity that fully preserves the memory of long listens that are here translated, explored and finally evolved.

The main richness comes from the seemingly raw aesthetics, however, it must be admitted, the production becomes a wise glue to offer refinement and the play of alchemical temporal threads.

A work that lends itself to study: the individual tracks are paths, but at the end of listening an unthinkable space materialises in the soul. Pain, frustration, fatigue here are not a list, a cry, but the principle of a revolt, of a moral passport to be invented, and the five demonstrate compactness and mutual loyalty.

One glides through the hands, between shivers and amazements, to silence boredom, because, undeniably, in this artistic minutiae we find spiritual intersections.

All that remains now is for us to pick up each of these compositions and give thanks for their content...

Song by Song

1 - Thresholds

‘There are Thresholds beyond, where time does not matter’.

A dusty guitar and a constant tear build an arpeggio to begin a long discourse that will expand with the other tracks. The crooning, initially in English, ends in Italian, while the arpeggio continues to remind us of the ambient post-rock of the second half of the 1990s. It's anticipation, it's mystery, it's slow, wonderful thunder...

2 - A New Life

‘The weight of these days is bearable, I don't need a normal life’

Acidic petals come out of a cage and run with trepidation, in the rapacious capture of a new existence, while a mixture of Killing Joke and Au Pairs makes us feel we are in a cellar of a distant time. But in the refrain we realise a freshness that the solo that comes immediately after enhances. It is metamorphosis that seeks a climate. And it will find it...

3 - To Forget

‘I've forgotten all the affection from you’

The singing governs the prestige of fingers capable of visiting the New York sound dear to the lovers of No Wave and then displacing us by means of sonic bushes that bring us to the present day, with the talent that forms a meeting of centripetal forces towards the rocks of the city of Matera: it is a frothing-at-the-mouth race, in a misleading hallucination, perfectly lubricated by the semi-pop tone of the refrain...

4 - I Remember You

‘I stay here completely alone, licking my wounds and counting my scars’

Manchester calls, Matera answers and London applauds. With Borland's Sound weeping and embracing the Matera band for this exploration that, beginning with a sexy yet vibrant bass, brings dream pop feathered guitar to the fore. And it is rapid ecstasy, to be experienced while the drumming, like Belgian memories of the best coldwave, synthesises the souls and connects them to perfection. If The Edge had been more interested in varying his style, here he would have embraced Bruno Pantone...

5 - Dirt

‘All you touch turns to dirt’

There was the new Welsh psychedelia, at the dawn of the nineties, trying to marry with the nefarious, slow and agonising textures of the Dirty Boys, in a dangerous and skilful mixture. The harmonic succession leads to a limited distortion, with the drums being a whip that punishes and governs the balsamic wave of a vocal that, like a spirit under the effect of a mental acid, defies chemistry, taming it. The pinnacle of the entire work is positioned here, with the seductive succession of notes starting with Southern Death Cult and gliding up to Gorky's Zycotic Mynci.

6 - One More Time

‘Silence like a bomb, I can't think, just one breath and another’.

There is no shortage of primitive industrial movements crossing over with American shoegaze, all oiled by a sinister texture that one suspects could kill the tranquillity of an innocent thought. Poisonous, high-pitched, the song shows how the travelling latitudes of their style is a non-stop sky light

7 - Sunshine

‘All on fire everywhere’

Kitchens of Distinctions and early Church are enraptured by the fact that the earthquake pill that grafts itself onto the nerves is Italian: the sound, opaque, unnerving and vibrant, translates spiritual textures and leaves it to the bass to bombard the melody to extinguish the night...

8 - Whisper

‘Air and sun, which I've never looked for’

The water of thought climbs the stairs: a dirty guitar craves the tracks of a bass that simplifies the lyrics, while the voices, here often doubled, generate a series of sensory windows that, starting from Peter Murphy, reach the Catherine Wheel's house, on a day when the sun strikes...

9 - Invisible

‘I lag behind, I'm not in step’

When the song becomes a lair, the breaths become precise: as if it had been birthed by the Adorable of Vendetta, it tries to spite and go into hiding and create its own identity. The contrast of the male voice with the female voice gives compactness and dreaminess, while cognitive installations of a piece that tries to write a new story for the group become evident. Hence its freshness and uniqueness, a broadening of the ropes of possibility almost knocking on an indie pop that waits voluptuously for the Matera combo not to leave...

10 - Together

‘Our love is a big cage, from which I don't want to escape’.

Where did we start from? From the band that had rocked the world with Nag Nag Nag: Cabaret Voltaire. The Matera-based line-up does the same: it starts with something known in order to fly into the unknown, in a truly well-structured nomadic process, calling upon a plethora of butterflies made up with eyeliner and pink nail polish, to polish up comparisons that can be avoided. Here it is the backbone that wins, the crass matter of a sword that wounds the skin and reminds us how Bauhaus never ended their earthly presence. Here, then, is the continuation of that now mythological affair paired with the recent Bambara, perfectly uniting Britain and America. A delirium like a mantra to be oxidised, totally...

11 - Goodbye

‘You don't know, you are paralysed, you don't know why, will you survive?’ 

Art can create itches, make the skin redden and bone up, which is all well and good. The pace remains high here as well, but one is sure that the quintet could not do without the talent of decomposition, in a frenetic and morbid puzzle, to finalise everything in a magnetically fixed drift forever...

12 - Breath

‘We will love each other, without limits or constraints, I want to dream’

A sly guitar, a damp bass, dry, moody drums and the amniotic, cruel voice at its altar are the protagonists of a composition that surrounds the English shoegaze of the early days and seeks a psychedelic arm to renounce excess. Recollected, subtle, the song presses memory and unites three decades in a bridge where the eyes notice, between the lanes of a very brief arrangement, the band's future...

13 - End

‘We had nothing, and nothing had that sound’.

The pain comes, like a sentence: the album must end and the boys explore the sound, the play of chimes, syncopated rhythm and the sting of a paralysing wait. It sounds wide, the composition, like a night scope after an endless rain. Bass, drums and voice find themselves amidst the delicate but heartbreaking chimes of a guitar that makes us weep. In this exploratory rarefaction, the slowness becomes a thrill that sentences: this band has touched its perfection, like a definitive gift for our existence...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

15th May 2025

https://godinablacksuit.bandcamp.com/album/thresholds

https://open.spotify.com/album/47iKT2U28JPKhuewrlM3Pk?si=Y3DHwOHvQDm90J8fSOyvxw

https://music.apple.com/gb/album/thresholds/1810903637