My Review: Graveyard Train - Hollow

Graveyard Train - Hollow

Scene: a child with his eyes glued to his ocean casts his gaze, and along with it his voice and time, to grease the dream of a dark delirium. What you hear is music that descends into the bowels to find a den of vipers in manifest attitude of burrs gathered in the seconds before an attack. Four, five, six strings and tar-filled skins, a myriad of instruments assembled to run that baby act through the six Melbourne musicians on the wrong side of town. 

The stories told are sabre-rattling demons with metallic, bloated grins, facing into the pain of a discomfort that welcomes miles of romance, where madness is perhaps God's smile... An album full of secrets, of torments, of manifest tension, of reverberating obsessions, with the blues caressing the slide guitar about to confirm the mingling of alt-rock, the most malignant country and the darkest side of an arsenal that knows forms, modes, toxicity and alcohol without the cap, and within the pike jump towards an inebriated belly.

Understanding what goes on in Melbourne's lunar, nocturnal desert is extremely complex: among the stragglers, the souls hanging from a needle, a bottle, or locked in desolate solitary meditation, it is the Australian band's unabashed binoculars that make the difference, rolling out the shame, the fear, and nailing them between dusty grooves and grated souls.

The writing scheme involves powerful guitars and vocals that are representative of the darker side of those strings that dig into the south-west side of the USA, filtering, dilating, in order to put a timbre that allows no insecurities: the eleven compositions come from the land of koalas, no doubt about it. It is useless, harmful, rather banal and stupid to quote Nick Cave: we are a long way from that marvellous, unhinged, adolescent madness of the singer who later found himself the epicentre of so many new souls.

No, these are not bards, wolves of the night, not even a parade of cruel behavioural cloudbursts. Graveyard Train (with this sonic ensemble finally determined to have a full-time drummer) are on the opposite side of any self-confessed certainty: describing them is like throwing a handful of raw sand on the ocean waves.

The coordinates are literary first and foremost, with distrust of the human being, ending up showing continuous paralysis. The instrumental part is a noxious combo, a grating of objects slapped together to produce foam and crystallise suffering, not as a plea for help but as a slab showing the behavioural cancer of a humanity now nailed to its books. And so, in this epidermic crystalline context of constant yelps, a fiduciary link to depression and overt vice is affirmed, a drink is invited to remind us how under the Melbourne sky there is a child who, hypnotised and bamboozled under the effect of endless nightmares, has no past, let alone a future. The choruses, so avowedly linked to the American rockabilly option of the 1950s, rattle out verses that avowedly come out of readings from books kept secretly in basements, denying them the chance to offer themselves to the awareness of a world uninterested in doing so. Adem Johansen is a hypothetical barbed wire, with the petals of sweetness that know how to appear in the few moments when the ballad suspends the sonic procession so prone to German psychedelia, for a truly impressive leap into space.

The slide guitar on those few occasions takes over, removing the black and inserting a melancholic but dreamy blue. In those songs, the band loses the concentric impact to nourish the soul's need for that child's soul...

The clarity of the sound serves to exalt the dark side of a city increasingly victimized by progress, always adept at marginalising the weak, and in all this the sense of unease seems a friend in a state of grace. A bundle of sound particles for a journey into the pleasure of a vice that takes away the dimension of understanding and awareness. Bleak, crude, itchy, unbearable stories needed an electric cable, rhythms without hesitation, a weight equal to that of oil-soaked lyrics. The pub ballad as well as the wild dance on the edge of a bad night meet in the place of these songs that often recall the films of cocaine-filled parties, for dreams with a recurring nightmare

Frighteningly credible, the sound carpet is shock therapy, in the swamps of a future that here turns to dust-filled records. Often the voice seems the consequence of the devil putting his fingers in the grip of a selfishness: unhinged, without oxygen, Adem's uvula offers no doubts because normality exists and does not live here!

A long fatuous fire crosses time, nails hope on the cross of eternity with these continuous fragmentations, in the tenebrous ups and downs of a work that allows the six to be hated well, almost with love: they do not lack the courage to tar lies, idiocies, to take sides against the market, sons of that Australian left that does not use the megaphone but songs like dung, to cover others' incapabilities.

They end it all with a dive into the firecracker that ends the world: where there is objectivity the only surrender consists of musical writing that will be remembered in the next bing bang...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

11th September 2023

https://graveyardtrain.bandcamp.com/album/hollow

La mia Recensione : Slowdive - everything is alive

Slowdive - everything is alive

E’ fuggito dal labirinto della realtà ed è finito sotto la ruota dei sogni!

(Mikhail Kuzmin)

Un labirinto, una donna al centro, il viso indecifrabile, colori pastello rendono l’immagine un percorso da iniziare, immaginando che la musica sappia far muovere i passi e condurli all’uscita.

Tornano i cinque gabbiani di Reading, affamati di vita ma generosi nel lasciare cadere dall’alto dei loro maestosi voli cibo per le nostre anime: si rimane a bocca aperta e gli occhi intinti in un sogno liquido. Capaci di disinfettare il loro senso artistico da trappole corsare sempre pronte a ingabbiare il talento, gli Slowdive compiono il lavoro più completo della loro lunga percorrenza artistica, generando aria fresca nei motori delle loro composizioni, decidendo di costruire il tutto con  imponenti richiami alla Storia umana, con immagini che paiono giungere da luoghi e Tempi molto lontani. Entrano in modo definitivo nello spirito Post-Rock, nell’elettronica imbevuta di morbida propensione all'incanto, per anestetizzare la consueta volontà verso una possibilità nel generare frastuono, e l’abilità di raffinare ancora di più una scrittura che conosce modalità diverse per poter connettersi all’inevitabilità della morte. Due lutti si sono succeduti in questi anni per quei membri della band che hanno trasportato il proprio dolore verso la contemplazione e la serenità. 

Avete mai sognato di entrare in un arcobaleno? Ecco, già sapete della sua breve esistenza, del suo destino con una veloce data di scadenza. 

Questo fanno i cinque gabbiani di Reading: ci offrono un unico appuntamento con quella destabilizzante sensazione che oltre la loro musica non vi siano confini da sfiorare. Toccante, rassicurante, disarmante, l’ultimo lavoro vive di dettagli come fermagli per i capelli di pensieri in un agglomerato lucente, intento a sondare con un regale distacco i nostri sentimenti. Non è Shoegaze, non è Dreampop, è un concept album sulla bellezza priva di retorica, una raffineria che incendia i sentimenti di seta, portando il volo di un sentire non comune in giro per i cieli di un mondo che se ignora la propria ignoranza può cibarsi di tutto questo: se l’eternità è ciò che l’uomo cerca, eccola qui, nella dimensione terrena, pronta a essere stabilizzata nella corsia della gioia. Pensate al titolo: un dato di fatto, un'affermazione priva di drammaticità o di luci, dove il bene e il male rimangono in vita. Nulla cambia, se non il desiderio di musicare la realtà nel fascio organico di una piattaforma onirica che privilegia la lentezza, senza però smarrire l’innato approccio Pop che fa di questo gruppo musicale l’unica meteora che non si congeda mai…

Impiegano anni per tornare, lo fanno in questo modo, e si sa, noi essere umani svuotati di inclinazioni alla profondità, non possiamo che rimanere confusi innanzi a questa dimostrazione di classe che tende sempre più a illuminare la loro carriera e le nostre esigenze. La pandemia ha rallentato l’impulso schizofrenico della natura tutta, compresa quella nostra, di persone sempre più perse e disperse. In quel periodo il mastro Neil pensava di dirigere le sue composizioni verso una pura forma elettronica. Una volta consegnate, quelle forme sono state impastate dagli altri quattro ed ecco il risultato: il labirinto della copertina sonda ogni forma per divincolarsi dalla stagnazione, anche da quella musicale, per partorire una indagine che da emotiva raggiunge il livello spirituale, come una danza calma per far sentire la morbidezza dei nostri fianchi. Non un laboratorio,  uno studio, una sala prove, bensì un volo di anime intrecciate a pochi passi dal baricentro dell’universo: non è mai stata così prossima la loro Reading a divenire la capitale delle nostre affamate ambizioni. Misurati con gli effetti, semplici nelle ritmiche, ogni brano non conosce evoluzioni continue ma uno schema semplice, minuscolo e tuttavia dannatamente efficace. Ed è questa componente che porterà molti “seguaci” degli Slowdive al lamento, a sentirsi traditi con questo lavoro che sembra chiaramente contenere bellissime briciole del loro percorso artistico, ma con la chiara necessità di perlustrare altre forme di vita.

Generosa è la propensione a circondare gli accordi di tappeti elettronici che consentano a Simon Scott di vibrare con il suo drumming nell’incanto di un imbuto dalle pareti dorate. Le due chitarre (Neil Halstead e Christian Savill) sono un goniometro che imprigiona ogni smarrimento per liberarle avendo avuto in dono la loro grazia. Mai spavalde, mai strafottenti, mai permalose, le due sei corde sono vitamina pura, capaci di entrare nella psichedelia come nello Space-Rock meno gravido, e di tergiversare per il tempo giusto con alchemie vicine agli Alan Parson Project, così come ai Can e ai Kraftwerk, per un giro temporale e geografico davvero notevole. Mr. Nick Chaplin è semplicemente il miglior bassista a disposizione di quei sogni che abbisognano di una sferzata per tenere il busto eretto. 

Detto questo: non si possono negare le profonde interazioni di una scrittura di trame sonore con quelle dei testi, per la prima volta ermetici, sfuggenti ma incapaci (grazie a Dio o a chi ne fa le veci) di lasciarci nel pericoloso brodo dell’indifferenza: la penna di Neil non è un faro, un bagliore, bensì un sussurro che non necessita di essere decifrato. I suoi testi sono geroglifici orgogliosi di essere compresi solo da lui, ma sanno sfiorare il cuore, regalare la convinzione che la sua sfera privata non debba essere violata. 

La parte che approda all’ambient è incredibilmente matura, permettendo ai diversi generi musicali presenti di vivere nello stesso spazio, senza frizioni, remore o tensioni. L’album è un fluido, che scende dalla bocca dei cinque gabbiani, in percorrenza verticale, per centrare perfettamente i nostri apparati, in parata, bisognosi e in attesa di non conoscere la parola fine…

Difficile immaginare, in un mondo che in modo sgarbato cataloga per poi dimenticare, dove questo fascio principesco possa essere relegato: specialmente in Inghilterra la musica dei giorni nostri assomiglia al gioco del potere di una massa che conosce la stagione di un giorno per esaltare, per poi buttare via tutto. Ma EVERYTHING IS ALIVE saprà resistere: alle divinità non si può opporre resistenza e queste otto canzoni tasteranno la fragilità dell’arroganza, annientandola con dolcezza sopraffina, elegantemente.

Saper ascoltare significa pilotare il tutto nell’incastro smisurato dell’immortalità, l’unico luogo adatto a questi otto bocconi di un cibo prelibato, capaci non solo di sfamare ma di soffermarsi nel ventre, nella mente, nelle nostre lente progressioni di danza, nei nostri sogni liberati con la chiave della loro classe, sigillo di sicurezza di una qualità indiscutibile.

Non ci resta che andare ad assaggiare ognuna di loro ringraziando in anticipo…

Song by Song 

1 - shanty

L’album inizia con una partitura, breve, di elettronica, la chitarra è molto simile a quella di Teardrop dei Massive Attack, ma capace di liberarsi dal pericoloso accostamento per poi incanalarsi in un gioco atmosferico che pare uscire da un anfiteatro greco, con la dolcezza delle voci della regina dei cuori Rachel, e quella di Neil, convogliando nel delicato binomio Postrock - Psichedelia che attraversa il cielo del nostro stupore…

2 - prayer remembered

Un vistoso calo di ritmo ci conduce nella planimetria del mondo Slowdive, tutto, dal lontano 1991 ai giorni nostri, in un pezzo strumentale che permette di sentire le voci dello spirito sostituire quelle del duo di Reading. È lacrima lenta che sale su in cielo, in quel fragore Post-Rock che accarezza la base Shoegaze della band, qui attenta, premurosa nel calibrare le suggestioni, con i colpi di drumming di Simon che danno ritmo a una continua esplorazione. Musica che esce dai granelli di sabbia di un deserto comportamentale: i cinque dipingono un capolavoro di inconsueta attesa, mai una esplosione, mai una esagerazione, bensì un continuo emigrare nella storia di una intensità che non abbisogna di frastuoni…

3 -alife

Il tempio dell’incanto ci mostra donna Rachel inchiodare i dubbi nel suo afflato, nel suo tributo, nel suo inchino poliedrico per consegnare il testimone della canzone dal buon ritmo a Neil, ed è un intreccio di sensazioni che giocano a mostrarsi, a cambiarsi d’abito, nell’unico brano dell’album che si concede qualche variazione in più, ma sempre nella corsia di  un necessario minimalismo. Tutto quì è uno spirito corsaro ingentilito, soffice, rapace ma capace di essere rispettoso e le tastiere dipingono conforto ispirando alle chitarre  una strada lastricata di opzioni che paiono essere suggerite dagli anni Sessanta…

4 - andalucia plays

Il Vecchio Scriba non ha dubbi: questa è la composizione più sofferta da parte di Neil, un calvario che scendendo dal cielo mostra gli sbadigli di un dolore quasi silenzioso ma esistente. Il suo cantato conduce al pianto, mentre suoni quasi new age e una chitarra in odore di Faith dei Cure si appoggia al nostro cuore, distruggendolo dolcemente. Torna quella semiacustica e la sensazione che proprio in queste note abiti tutta la talentuosa capacità che gli Dèi hanno concesso ai cinque di Reading. Compatta, lenta ma veloce ad approdare nei nostri involucri, fa della sua apparente semplicità un vanto sussurrato…

5 - Kisses

Pochi accordi, il ritmo mostra subito la sua tenera capacità di farci danzare in una storia dalla trama semplice ma che adopera metafore, anche musicali, per permetterci di inoltrarci nel sogno e baciare il desiderio di una dimensione onirica senza bavaglio sulle labbra. Con un fare decisamente Shoegaze, annettendo minuscole particelle acustiche, tutto scivola con l’eclettica loro capacità di trame complesse che si trasfigurano, concedendoci la possibilità di immagazzinare la magnificenza che abbiamo potuto ascoltare. Mantra corposo, dama incantevole per ogni corte, regale anche per anime povere, Kisses è la perfetta Pop song imbevuta di sogni, quando il Dreampop non è soltanto un genere da esibire ma una modalità di essere ultraterreni…

6 - skin in the game

La maturità non evitabile per i cinque gabbiani: trentadue anni di carriera necessitavano di una resa dei conti, di un momento in cui dovevano tornare: ecco ciò che è stato il loro arrivo, la loro percorrenza, il senso… Un distributore di piume nel sacco dei nostri corpi in apnea, perché queste chitarre sono una dinamite resa incandescente senza necessitare dell’esplosione bensì di un navigare, secondo dopo secondo, nel corpo amniotico di un labirinto eccelso…

7 chained to a cloud

Si può governare la marea di stelle che danzano nel cielo? Se ti chiami Slowdive come minimo puoi mettere sul palcoscenico la rappresentazione e abbandonare ogni velleità di poterle toccare. Però: la band di Reading ancora una volta affitta la maestria e disegna un involucro con i gioielli che vengono rilasciati dal canto angelico di Rachel, una donna bambina piena di grazia che, supportata da leggeri echi e riverberi, si trova a un passo dal cantato di Neil, per confezionare un piano di magnetismo colmo di una magia fluttuante, inossidabile e impermeabile, all’interno di un loop che con la tastiera trova il modo di fissare il brano nell’Olimpo, l’unico luogo dove le comete non muoiono mai. Sei minuti e cinquantuno secondi dove ciò che non si verifica è il rispetto per questa elaborata parentesi tonda dentro la quale la matematica cambia pelle e diventa brivido…

8 - the slab

Nel cielo di Reading una scossa elettrica, un fremito, un’estasi verace e vorace prende possesso dei sensi e determina la nascita di un amplesso sonoro senza precedenti: the slab è il laboratorio dell’inconsueto, un gioco imprevisto, un’assonanza inusuale che determina terremoti emotivi capaci di dirigere la valutazione dell’album con due sole parole: GRAZIA MULTIPLA.

Le chitarre sono lapidarie, ma non ferme, bensì le ali di gabbiani che afferrano la melodia e la inchiodano nelle corsie di uno spazio mai così generose di elaborate strategie sonore. Definendo tutto ciò che abbiamo sinora udito e portandolo fuori della nostra comprensione, la chiosa è un gioiello che regala la conferma che gli Slowdive siano capaci di avere il suono del nostro tempo ma perfettamente connesso con quello che lo ha preceduto. Lo sanno fare solo i Maestri questo tipo di operazione…

Concludendo: nella speranza che spariscano gli opinionisti, gli inetti, i precisatori di ogni sciocchezza, questo lavoro è un un combo stratosferico nel quale crescere e una piscina in cui navigare tra le canzoni che alla fine diventano onde capaci di ospitare ogni nostra sciocchezza.

Ma è proprio cibo quello che cadrà senza sosta dai cinque gabbiani ai quali dobbiamo l’eterno inchino…

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

7 Settembre 2023

https://slowdive.bandcamp.com/album/everything-is-alive

My Review: Slowdive - everything is alive

Slowdive - everything is alive

He escaped from the labyrinth of reality and ended up under the wheel of dreams!

(Mikhail Kuzmin)

A labyrinth, a woman in the centre, her face indecipherable, pastel colours make the image a path to start, imagining that music can make the steps move and lead them to the exit.

The five seagulls of Reading return, hungry for life but generous in dropping food for our souls from the heights of their majestic flights: we are left open-mouthed and our eyes dipped in a liquid dream. Able to disinfect their artistic sense from the corsair traps always ready to cage talent, Slowdive do the most complete job of their long artistic journey, generating fresh air in the engines of their compositions, deciding to build everything with imposing references to human history, with images that seem to come from faraway places and times. They definitively enter into the Post-Rock spirit, into electronics imbued with a soft propensity for enchantment, to anaesthetise the usual will towards a possibility in generating noise, and the ability to further refine a writing that knows different ways to connect with the inevitability of death. Two bereavements have occurred in recent years for those band members who have transported their grief towards contemplation and serenity.

Have you ever dreamed of entering a rainbow? Here, you already know about its short existence, its fate with a quick expiration date.

This is what the five seagulls from Reading do: they offer us a single date with that destabilising feeling that beyond their music there are no boundaries to touch. Touching, reassuring, disarming, the latest work lives on details like hairpins of thoughts in a shining agglomerate, intent on probing our feelings with a regal detachment. It's not shoegaze, it's not Dreampop, it's a concept album about beauty devoid of rhetoric, a refinery that sets feelings on fire with silk, taking the flight of an uncommon feeling around the skies of a world that, if it ignores its own ignorance, can feed on it: if eternity is what man seeks, here it is, in the earthly dimension, ready to be stabilised in the lane of joy. Think of the title: a fact, a statement devoid of drama or light, where good and evil remain alive. Nothing changes, except the desire to set reality to music in the organic beam of a dreamlike platform that favours slowness, without however losing the innate Pop approach that makes this musical group the only meteor that never leaves...

They take years to come back, they do it this way, and you know, we are human beings drained of inclinations to depth, we can't help but be confused at this display of class that tends to increasingly illuminate their careers and our needs. The pandemic has slowed down the schizophrenic impulse of all nature, including our own, of increasingly lost and scattered people. At that time, Master Neil thought he was directing his compositions towards a pure electronic form. Once delivered, those forms were kneaded by the other four, and here is the result: the labyrinth of the cover probes every form to break free from stagnation, including musical stagnation, to give birth to an investigation that from emotional reaches the spiritual level, like a calm dance to make us feel the softness of our hips. Not a laboratory, a studio, a rehearsal room, but a flight of intertwined souls a few steps from the centre of gravity of the universe: never has their Reading been so close to becoming the capital of our hungry ambitions. Measured in their effects, simple in their rhythms, each track knows no continuous evolution but a simple, tiny and yet damn effective pattern.

And it is this component that will lead many Slowdive 'followers' to lament, to feel betrayed by this work that clearly seems to contain beautiful crumbs of their artistic journey, but with a clear need to peruse other forms of life.

Generous is the propensity to surround the chords with electronic carpets that allow Simon Scott to vibrate with his drumming in the enchantment of a golden-walled funnel. The two guitars (Neil Halstead and Christian Savill) are a goniometer that imprison every bewilderment to free them, having been gifted their grace. Never swaggering, never overbearing, never touchy, the two six-stringers are pure vitamin, capable of entering into psychedelia as well as the less pregnant Space-Rock, and searching for energies for the right amount of time with alchemies close to the Alan Parson Project, as well as Can and Kraftwerk, for a truly remarkable temporal and geographical tour.

Mr. Nick Chaplin is simply the best bass player available for those dreams that need a lash to keep their torso erect.

Having said that: there is no denying the profound interactions of writing sound plots with those of the lyrics, for the first time hermetic, elusive but incapable (thank God or whoever) of leaving us in the dangerous soup of indifference: Neil's pen is not a beacon, a glow, but a whisper that does not need to be deciphered. His lyrics are hieroglyphics proud to be understood only by him, but they know how to touch the heart, to give the conviction that his private sphere should not be violated.

The ambient part is incredibly mature, allowing the different musical genres present to live in the same space, without friction, hesitation or tension. The album is a fluid, flowing down from the mouths of the five seagulls, in a vertical journey, to perfectly centre our apparatuses, on parade, in need and waiting to not know the end...

It is hard to imagine, in a world that rudely catalogues and then forgets, where this princely bundle might be relegated: especially in England, modern-day music resembles the power play of a mass that knows the season of one day to exalt, only to throw it all away. But EVERYTHING IS ALIVE will endure: gods cannot be resisted, and these eight songs test the fragility of arrogance, annihilating it with over-the-top gentleness, elegantly.

Knowing how to listen means piloting the whole thing into the boundless interlock of immortality, the only suitable place for these eight morsels of a delicious food, capable not only of feeding but of lingering in the belly, in the mind, in our slow dance progressions, in our dreams liberated with the key of their class, the security seal of an unquestionable quality.

All that remains is for us to go and taste each of them, thanking them in advance....

Song by Song

1 - shanty

The album begins with a short, electronic score, the guitar is very

similar to that of Massive Attack's Teardrop, but capable of freeing

itself from the dangerous juxtaposition and then channelling itself

into an atmospheric game that seems to come out of a Greek

amphitheatre, with the sweetness of the voices of the Queen of

Hearts Rachel, and that of Neil, conveying the delicate Postrock

Psychedelia combination that crosses the sky of our

astonishment..

2 - prayer remembered

A conspicuous drop in rhythm takes us through the Slowdive world plan, everything from far-off 1991 to the present day, in an instrumental piece that allows us to hear the voices of the spirit replace those of the Reading duo. It's slow tears that rise up to the sky, in that Post-Rock roar that caresses the shoegaze base of the band, here careful, thoughtful in calibrating the suggestions, with Simon's drumming strokes that give rhythm to a continuous exploration. Music that comes out of the grains of sand of a behavioural desert: the five of them paint a masterpiece of unusual expectation, never an explosion, never an exaggeration, but rather a continuous migrating into the history of an intensity that does not need noise...

3 -alife

The temple of enchantment shows us Rachel nailing doubts in her afflatus, in her tribute, in her multifaceted bowing to hand over the baton of the song with a good rhythm to Neil, and it is a tangle of sensations that play at showing themselves, at changing clothes, in the only track of the album that allows itself a few more variations, but always in the lane of a necessary minimalism. Everything here is a mellowed corsair spirit, soft, rapacious but capable of being respectful, and the keyboards paint comforting, inspiring the guitars on a road paved with options that seem to be suggested by the Sixties

4 - andalucia plays

The Old Scribe has no doubts: this is Neil's most painful composition yet, an ordeal that descends from the heavens and shows the yawns of an almost silent but existing pain. His singing leads to weeping, while almost new age sounds and a guitar in the odour of The Cure's Faith rests on our hearts, gently destroying them. That semi-acoustic comes back, and the feeling that it is in these notes that all the talent that the Gods have bestowed on the five from Reading dwells. Compact, slow but quick to land in our envelopes, it makes a whispered boast out of its apparent simplicity...

5 - Kisses

With just a few chords, the rhythm immediately shows its tender capacity to make us dance in a story with a simple plot, but which uses metaphors, including musical ones, to allow us to enter the dream and kiss the desire for a dreamlike dimension without gagging our lips. With a decidedly shoegaze-like manner, annexing tiny acoustic particles, everything glides with their eclectic capacity for complex textures that transfigure, allowing us to store up the magnificence we have been able to hear. A full-bodied mantra, an enchanting lady for every court, royalty even for poor souls, Kisses is the perfect dream-soaked pop song, when Dreampop is not just a genre to be exhibited but a way of being otherworldly...

6 - skin in the game

An unavoidable maturity for the five seagulls: thirty-two years of career needed a reckoning, a moment when they had to come back: that's what their arrival, their journey, their meaning was... A feather distributor in the sack of our apnoea bodies, because these guitars are dynamite made incandescent without the need for an explosion but rather for navigating, second by second, in the amniotic body of an exalted labyrinth...

7 chained to a cloud

Can you rule the tide of stars dancing in the sky? If your name is Slowdive, at the very least, you can put on a stage performance and abandon all pretensions of being able to touch them. But: the band from Reading once again rents the mastery and designs a casing with the jewels that are released by the angelic singing of Rachel, a childlike woman full of grace who, supported by light echoes and reverberations, is just a step away from Neil's singing, to pack a plane of magnetism filled with a floating, stainless and impermeable magic, within a loop that with the keyboard finds a way to fix the song in Olympus, the only place where comets never die. Six minutes and fifty-one seconds where what does not occur is respect for this elaborate round parenthesis within which mathematics changes skin and becomes thrill

8 - the slab

In the skies of Reading an electric shock, a tremor, a veracious and voracious ecstasy takes possession of the senses and determines the birth of an unprecedented sonic embrace: the slab is the laboratory of the unusual, an unforeseen game, an unusual assonance that determines emotional earthquakes capable of directing the evaluation of the album with only two words: MULTIPLE GRACE.

The guitars are lapidary, but not still, rather the wings of seagulls that grab the melody and nail it in the lanes of a space never so generous with elaborate sound strategies. Defining everything we have heard so far and bringing it out of our comprehension, the coda is a jewel that confirms that Slowdive are capable of having the sound of our time but perfectly connected to that which preceded it. Only the masters can do this...

In conclusion: in the hope that the pundits, the inept, the precisers of all nonsense will disappear, this work is a stratospheric combo in which to grow and a pool in which to navigate between the songs that eventually become waves capable of accommodating all our nonsense.

But it is precisely food that will fall relentlessly from the five seagulls to whom we owe the eternal bow...

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

7th September 2023

https://slowdive.bandcamp.com/album/everything-is-alive

My Review: Sinéad O’Connor - Troy

Sinéad O’Connor - Troy

Stories that enter life, often unverified, take a leap towards the human will to believe them, without wavering. Mythology helps, amplifies, generates a field in which everything rolls. We must go inside the greatest deception of earthly existences, enter the first real Matryoshka, a horse inside which strategy had its nest, to win a war, puzzling that it should be called a war of love. But a woman was kidnapped, torn from her reality and taken away.

In Sinèad O'Connor's debut album, we have the practicality of art that connects the threads, disintegrates them, disguises them, to throw them into the sacred temple of pain, of the greatest affront one can suffer: the lie.

An emotional implantation that runs back in time, probably also drawing on the pain of the Irish author herself, who in this composition frees the horses of her nature, wild as they are, to aim her uvula at hearts like a dutiful scratch, using an affair as a passport that binds the identity of truth to a badly tanned destiny. Love is shown, confronted, challenged, lost, leaving no opportunity to take refuge in a dream with a different destiny. What emerges is the most disconcerting, touching dowry, with a volume equal to the breadth of the universe: the ability to interpret words as if they were born in that instant and thrown into history, to touch the breath of the city of Troy, pretext and metaphor of the damnation that still pulsates in us, its legitimate heirs. A cut, a cry, screams like ivy inflamed by the dying blackness that mocks human events. She turns the lights on her resolute talent, permeated with a slime that sticks shame and welds it into the pulse of often seemingly harmless methods. A journalist of misery and cowardice, Sinéad begins the piece by musically evoking the Iliad and the Odyssey, taking us into the chronological hemisphere with which we are unfamiliar. The orchestration is a tomb that opens, waiting for its song, which is not only powerful but, more than anything else, a conscious cry that penetrates and builds the wooden horse full of secrets ready to kill the apathy of those who live poorly the absolute capacity of music to be a bridge, a highway and a wiper to move debris. It whispers, it accelerates, it screams, it groans, it plants oxygen like crabgrass as its eyes visit for us every sin to be atoned for. An orchestral tumult like thunder that seeks a momentary education to find a peace that instead, as the minutes pass, precipitates, seeking tentacles in the empty space of time and sky. Ancient feuds wash over, everything is accomplished with a score that becomes electric, with the melody sequestered by strings and then by a dry, metallic drumming that seems to punish even more, handing over to the change of rhythm one of the seven sceptres the song seems to need to maintain a balance.

Throughout the history of music, female singers have always pressed the button towards ostracism between the true and the false, creating mutes resistant to defamation and lies. The shiny-headed singer slips inside (in an intimate coat that she will never quite manage to conceal) a long series of reflections in order to tie up the past (the Trojan affair) and make it fit, without kissing it, with the awkward and problematic situation of the world in that late eighties that made approximation the outpost of what is happening now. The song allows the Irish singer to stitch together her visionary progressive attitude (it is no coincidence that the melodic texture of the song reminds us of Peter Gabriel, with whom she will later tour), both in the lyrics and in the musical carpet, a true temporary catapult, launching projectiles, wounding, without any anaesthesia. Everything knows sacredness and embarrassment: in its sighs, in the breath that falls heavy in the words, we cannot but wither. This can only happen if we are endowed with sensitivity and if we really know the story being told. Wisteria the sighs, ivy the high notes, for a portal of upheavals that not only throw us off balance. When her voice sinks into the low register, death seems to be beneath our feet and our ears tremble, like an inevitable earthquake. It is the strings that bring us back to the sky and make us feel less afraid.

"You should've left the light one": an invocation that splits the sky and like a rudderless wind takes away our joy and throws us into the storm of an orchestra excellently conducted by Gavyn Wright. A due, necessary race towards the appointment of lies makes forgiveness improbable: Sinéad is clear-headed and, like a torch, she lights the truth and nails it, forever, with this song, which deploys the sinful, Catholic-derived doings to give guilt improbable excuses. If one reflects on the systematic circular reproduction of the musical parts, one understands how the singing is a rake, a halberd for scratching and wounding the naivety of those who always find a way to pretend nothing is going on: long, by the pop standards of the time, the song is a theatrical act that needs a single light and many windows to expand the tale and stick it to the inevitable tremor on which the last words feed. 

"But you're still spitting fire": this is the stance that makes the characters, the roles, the misdeeds visible. Beware: in the story we only have one point of view, the other person has no voice, no reply. While we wonder why, here is Sinéad giving us an absolute truth, a ball of incontrovertible wisdom: even if she had told us a lot of lies, she would have our empathy, as surely pain does not need to expand to legitimise itself... Strikingly, the storm over the Dublin sky (at the beginning of the song) is an exhilarating exercise in taking us well away from the epicentre of facts and intentions right from the start. Ancient architecture, no longer known in this day and age, allows the text to do a bit like the kangaroo, a bit like the shrimp, managing to exert pressure in the ability to identify where the connection is. The voice, a warlike impasto of absolute poetry, takes care of it, spouting verses and throwing stones, defeating Troy, love, managing to disguise the whole...

The microtonal oscillations are paths of wild roses to the point of excess: nothing has perimeter, either in the text or in the music, to achieve the effect of a ride, sick and losing.

What more can be added but that the polyphonic sense, the symphonic beam, the bar of classical music are but umpteen miracles within this chick that today kisses Troy with the same heavy tears...

Nothing remains but love to keep you alive, Sinéad...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

1st August 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c4v7fp5GC8&t=90s