My Review
Fields Of the Nephilim - Dawnrazor
Pins.
Sleeping eyelashes.
Salt on wounds rolling on the ground.
Wickedness wheezes on the ankles of souls in search of disturbances.
It was the 1980s, a temple of divine decay embracing growing stupidity, knotted to the frenzy of fashions, to senseless and bleak changes of direction.
But from north London four opponents came forward, dressed in scattered readings in the darkness of damp, crumbling rocks.
Freed from their motions of anxiety and boredom, they plunged into fields full of blood flow which they coloured black.
Drunk from Aleister Crawley and H.P. Lovercraft, they threw themselves on the shores of comets gone mad, watching angels busy looking for women to impregnate. As the journey towards the apocalypse began, they plundered the breaths, donating dust to bag our lungs and extinguish them.
Like heartless earthquakes, they have made a pact with the dark, grabbed the throat of beauty and generated a path of investigations full of oil stain, cultured like endless volumes of books with uncomfortable and stinging codes. Lopsided wanderers with toxic thoughts, they anaesthetised the light to deliver their loyalty to the Master of Darkness.
They have taken up instruments to shoot toxins, to plunge us into the frenzy of confusion that is satisfied when all wanders lost, devoid of sense, of rules, of rat-tailed stupidity.
They have invented mental vessels that we banally call songs: they are screams snatched from suffering to create new ones, like a wicked merry-go-round that wears us out.
They have made our sadness their atomic collective laughter, toasting our fears, our troubled stomachs. And they have seized our palms, sprinkling them with ancient remission: without grip we can only fall into the void that they sanctify and bless as their supreme nectar.
But let us simplify...
Dawnrazor was released and those who cared about the fate of the gothic wall breathed a sigh of relief: the darkness had been enlarged with new chests to open, giving an obsession able to generate shivers and sobs.
After Post-Punk and Darkwave had begun to become a banal repetition of clichés devoid of possible excitement, the four guys, now five in number, threw themselves on the dirty territories, full of slurry with a twisted face, to give birth to electric shocks erudite by the most intense and sincere darkness. Songs like maps of loss, like flesh snatched from the useless race towards pleasure. They decided it was time for new preachers to come down to change the word of our creed.
A debut like a funeral: that of the banalities that in front of this exhibition of madness felt lost and dejected. Death after death to praise the new King of Heaven: Cthulhu.
How deep is the sea of fear, without a backdrop, without a border that cannot be seen even with a telescope: everything becomes distant, unreachable.
Here it cannot be said that we are talking about music!
Let alone songs.
They are tombstones vociferating ungraspable prayers, earthly fires assaulting our eardrums.
Don't expect technical explanations, not now, because the scribe is travelling inside impossible, experiencing hijackings, weeping at the thousandth listening to this riot of brambles, with no chance of having any knowledge to write about.
I am still lost, now as then, in the disaster I made that afternoon, deciding to enter a labyrinth that from that moment is a howl on which I depend.
Feeling like a parchment being kicked around by faithless dogs is unsettling: there's not a moment in Dawnrazor when you can think it's just a delirium with a timer. You realise this when the music falls silent. Because you keep swearing, railing, begging for forgiveness that the five of them won't grant.
I wonder why you have to be so naive and at the same time so lacking in respect for others writing a review about these deaf devils: of course, what an idiot I am, it's their fault, they brought me to their side, neutralising the reason I had until that afternoon.
So: I'd better talk about their immortality, their cloaks on which we find their Bible, the urgent need to make us obedient and apostles of a new religion.
Then you can't help but adore the guitars as rusty scimitars, the bass as the chastisement of rocks, the drums as the breath of the flow of our ignorance: this is the first guilt to be expiated.
The second is the perpetual motion of unhinged defences: nothing can stop the unhealthy writing, the voice with crystals crackling towards Carl McCoy's cliff full of mud.
And it is blinding stratosphere, lumps in the uvula for words that like a genuflection with no discounts are capable of peeling the skin. Delirium after infinite delirium, like a jammed volcano with no possibility of stopping the lava.
An album that sentences the separation between what must hurt and those bands hungry for imitations. Time has been wasted in calling them the little brothers of The Sisters of Mercy: it would be time to clarify, to listen and to understand that there is no fiction in the art of FOTN, which is the first step to affirm their difference. Dawnrazor is the lightning bolt that separates the mediocre massification of a gothic rock that had lost its edge compared to the vivid nuclear split of the knights of Stevenage, who discarded what empty souls had passed off as useful.
Listening to this debut reveals mastery, cunning, courage, insight. And writing methods like no one before and no one after: they stopped the clouds and filled them with unrepeatable stratagems and as such eternal.
I will try to describe what is indescribable, I will annihilate myself to give you their scratches, I will seek therapy to help me find the bravery that those who feel unworthy lack, because these thirteen hurricanes are waiting for us in their den to freeze us with fear and mystery with no sky left.
Song by Song
Intro (The Harmonica Man)
Take a bloody blade, go find Morricone with his elegance and add salt: everything will be more gloomy and catastrophic.
The guitars create a dizzying horror scenario and it's chaos immediately with a drumming that brings down Planet Earth: we go in the underworld.
Slow Kill
Epic, esoteric, cylindrical and upsetting, the second track is an expired, putrefied smile, fast to bring us in front of a new Messiah, with no choice, to wreck inside the elliptic vortices of poisonous guitars.
Laura II
When the bass pulses like the atrocious breath of the suffocating Bermuda grass. And it's a new run for a song which is revisited, corrected, made the Queen of the vocal kingdom of Carl, Lord of the unhealthy tale. The guitars cross, leading us to wrap ourselves in goth without risking boredom. The tour of death passes by, ravishes, plunders the heart and says goodbye. In the end, where we find a change of rhythm and atmosphere, it seems that the sky opens up to give us a smile: heaven forbid, it is only a wonderful deception...
Preacher Man
There is not Morricone here, but Giuliano Gemma in the film "ARIZONA COLT/MAN FROM NOWHERE" by Michele Lupo, who gives us the dust of guns in a desert where death fires its bullets. And it is the kingdom of confusion, of oblique mantras, of the sense of death that the five guys need to eliminate the sense of beauty in order to replace it with alienation and the mother of hell: fear. While the cities sleep they inject poison in bursts.
Incessant, neurotic, it is mould dust which envelops us, with radiation and contamination...
Volcano (Mr. Jealousy Has Returned)
The one who holds the destiny shows his grin inside the heart of a woman, to make her burn in his evil volcano: it is a psychedelic devastation of irritating and sick guitars to mark the ground of madness. FOTN show muscles that stick to supreme gothic rock and win the game of pain, of overpowering.
Vet for the Insane
Everything takes the breath it needs to resist oppression and what is better than slow deception? The priests slow the pace, but in doing so they launch an attack that, through dreamlike manner, breaks the legs and declares their absolute power.
The sound drowns to paralyse the flowers of a devastated kitchen. There is no more house, everything is submerged in the delicate teasing of a delicate fake bass, like its guitars, which as bloody twins use a deceptive melody to blow up our home: what was firm in us dies. The end.
Secrets
The priests demand a path in which you follow them with pure obedience. You do it to lose yourself completely, with forgiveness celebrating their throne. It is the victory of guitars in great shape, snakes that cross with the bass that lays down the law while the drums shake the dust of our obsessions. Majestic example of how their desire is fulfilled by detaching from the limits of that musical genre, finding the right escape route to determine the strategy of complexity.
Dust
A brain swims in a pool to know the crowding of nothingness: Dust is the London atomic bomb which destroys the enemy. FOTN eat blood and drink the crystalline air of cadaveric dust. A military march where the orders are given by a bass that bounces in the brain, the voice wheezes exploding in camouflaged and hoarse low tones: let there be space for the mute and mutilated heroes that the drums shake and invite to attack.
Reanimator
A woman is helped, on her deathbed, with little chance. Liquid crystals dance within that pair of simply connected six-strings in sublime and enchanting arpeggios. They transform, these black angels, like bad Samaritans, to give illusions, sticking their blade and using it as complex but exhaustive sonic tangles.
And when the rhythm shakes us in this way, the sweaty skin remains to ascertain our trembling.
Power
That which conquers entraps freedom: FOTN make robberies with sibylline words and guitars that delve into a blues which lives in a saloon: sly, bitter, but devastating. It's a puffing train, its blackened coal polluting the sky as it descends under the skin of the earth to make us devastated dreamers. A rare guitar solo surprises and confuses and then hands over to the rhythm section the power to ignite dreams.
The Tower
How adorable is the crown of tears Carl places on the head of this unfortunate woman?
A story of nettles slowly rising into the sky to create the rhythm and become the desperate hammer that crushes all resistance. It is post-punk that says farewell and leaves the scene to gothic-rock for a bloody catharsis. A rhythmic up and down that sounds like an electrocardiogram to determine the short circuit of that bloodless woman.
Dawnrazor
And here are cruel bites attacking the resistance of dreams: a fight to the last drop of blood. The guitars launch the attack, the drums roll on the breaths, the bass pushes the ashes to dust the scene.
Carl takes his voice and throws it into the infernal crater: his glove becomes a razor blade and his song is a vulgar prayer, swelling in progress, waiting for the vicious flow to stop raging. The gothic curve explodes with the applause of the macabre creatures who bow down in devotion.
The Sequel
The album ends with death returning: terror, shivers, useless tears illuminating a lost face. Triumph, the victory of evil, the succession of events in this album determine the sense of addiction to the roar, the surrender that was anticipated. The English band is a nightmarish privateer trained to act cruelly, to always win. We end up with the song that is the only one that can close this path: it was necessary to create the conceptual apotheosis, with lyrics and a musical start full of joyful tombstones. Having certified our defeat, we sing hymns to Cthulhu. The spirit of Howard Phillips Lovecraft wanders among the fiery bubbles: The Sequel is the altar where surrendered senses show themselves and the pounding drumming is a celebration of explosive boasting.
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
1st may 2022
- Carl McCoy – vocals
- Peter Yates – guitar
- Paul Wright – guitar
- Tony Pettitt – bass
- Alexander Wright – drums
