My Review: Man of Moon - Machinism

 Man Of Moon - Machinism

For several years now, new rivalries have appeared, problematic coexistences weighing down our existences, making individual and mass relationships extremely complicated. The advancement of technology, physical and mental immobility, and a massive dose of laziness are generating tensions that are impossible not to see and feel.

Some of this flows into the band Man Of Moon's resounding second album, a long-distance effort that allowed joy and awe to embrace each other in 2020, and that effect endures to this day: Dark Sea was one of the most significant debuts of recent years. 

And after four, Iain Stewart (the new drummer) and Chris Bainbridge (vocals, guitar, bass, electronics), offer a work that is perfectly attuned to the social themes addressed and to music that knows how to range in an over-the-top way, finding a way to give slight signs of continuity with the first work, but above all the will to create a sonic theme that specifies intentions and directions, an open-air laboratory, an investigation, a metamorphosis, a slow walk in the heart of fantasies and needs that are perfectly in sync.

It is a long look inside images, habits, of what has changed and brought to excess the need to place oneself constantly in the spotlight, with the consequent death of privacy, of deep thought, consigning everything to the merciless hands of the Market, with the old values exhaling their last breaths and the new ones being the prerogative of a new youth no longer able to remain connected with the older one.

The album is a scudding, gentle, sonic vice within habits, a highlighting of upheavals with a gaze that is the basis of atmospheres ranging between gloomy and cheerful: Chris and Iain do not want to deliver a resigned attitude but to be messengers endowed with strength, courage, removing dangerous and harmful spaces from hallucinations and extremisms. Music to educate, to seek a different contact to create conditions for improvements that can trigger new strategies, also through dance, an ancient system for compacting souls.

To do all this, the use of instruments, the same as in the debut, here finds the refined ability to extend the colours, the sounds, with the ability to channel thoughts into clear emotions, albeit also through an inevitable dose of drama. But you can hear the project, the intention that runs through the eleven episodes, to create a mood and a mantra that keeps the tension high, a polite scream that puts on those shivers capable of not leaving the listening mind impassive.

 Sensitivity grows, the shrewdness of using doses of rational implants that are not misunderstood, ensuring that the whole is an undeniable opportunity to make a portentous leap towards something not previously done, not necessarily to be defined but certainly to be experienced, creating the terrain of a novelty that makes behaviour unequivocal, giving a thrashing to the excessive desire for freedom, a leitmotif that in the end is the cause of almost all evil today.

Respect is exhumed, the pride of human intelligence that wants to reject artificial intelligence, even if it welcomes the latter, but establishing different boundaries. An extremely shrewd, profound work, so effective that it leaves one completely surprised, shocked, with at the end of listening the urge to say enough and roll up one's sleeves.

The compositions arrive on the epidermis and then enter the venereal circuits, the labyrinths of thought, the bones deciding fragmented but powerful dances, a continuous shaking without pause: it is certainly not the slowest songs that grant calm, because none of this exists in this thunderous album, which is nothing if not a gentle but impossible to stop avalanche on our part, resulting in a cry for the only necessary general present miracle, which is to be established in the awakening of consciousness, coming out of the poisoning and subsequent torpor.

The moon here is really split in two and the man looking at it must move, change perspective in his gaze, think about the survival of true wealth, the intact wealth, and be shaken by the rays coming from there, without any resistance. Increasingly isolated from the social context, the human being of Machinism can enjoy a thunderous and important concession: to see for real the distances, the sense of inner and outer space, and to seek within himself those capacities that make contact the only possible form of salvation.  The musical flows are the basis of important inspections, of genres that mingle in search of their own elevation, in an earthly circle where melody, harmony and rhythm live an intense twinning, delivering songs that, in addition to thoughts and dance, are able to console, to see the band retain their initial roots but with the great will to draw new plots, inspections, for those stylistic possibilities that confer, undeniably, massive applause. So many novelties, an ups and downs of sidereal ‘games’, inspections that end up delivering a truly miraculous framework, to make this art a resounding foothold, without smearing. 

The electronics live a new season, less separated from the rock/indie/alternative structure, for a union that puts down different roots, offers the hook for connections desired but impossible, before, to become a devastating reality. Iain enhances the rhythmicity, creating innovative spaces, able to join Chris's sonic prairies in a combo that envelops, sows new and different dreams that in a few minutes turn out to be real and credible, in a sensorial rush that enhances, perfectly, a genial preventive machination.  The bass and guitar are more united than in the debut, and the keyboard bases are less isolated, less conspicuous but more in keeping with a united message, which starts with what is listened to in its entirety, ending up with a complexity that slips perfectly into pleasantness. The main form is to diminish the desire for the verse and the refrain, to make the listener concentrate more on the signals, the sounds, the dynamics, the flows that seem to become matter, second by second, with a high control of the expressive structures.

The production, which is excellent, enhances a general sensation that is more intuitive than practical, a sonic non-concept album that seems to be so, to compact itself perfectly with the lyrics that are decisive, energetic, determined with paintings of poetic verses that enchant and surprise.   The first part of Machinism thrives on greater expressions of elevated rhythmic propensities, where speed is a methodical urgency balanced towards message comprehension. The second, where there is certainly no lack of rhythm and a certain sonic ‘aggressiveness’, appears to be an agitated sleep, a journey into dreamlike activities that must be interrupted as there is a task to be accomplished in a hurry. Perfectly uniting these two sections, it is immediately clear that the order of the songs has involved a good deal of rational work, for a result that highlights genius, skill and the identification of that cultural aspect that today's music seems to want to overlook. But the two boys from Glasgow have broad shoulders, an alert and brilliant intuition, intent on being not fellow listeners but the inspirers of new vitality, in an urgency pregnant with sparks and perfectly friendly moonbeams.

Let's arm ourselves with curiosity and dive into these eleven episodes: there is beauty waiting for us, with open arms, full of confidence...

Song by Song

1 - RISE

Landing on planet beauty begins with the band's immediately recognisable style, the long guitar sound that glues together a sense of friction that fascinates and shakes at the same time, and then off with a rock tribality that winks at barely hinted at electronic experimentation. 

Magnetic.

2 - YOU AND I

The third to last single before the release of this second album, it has the ability to give the singing mode the ability to capture the attention and then approach a form of expression close to less marked space rock. Dark, electric, sensual, the song takes us on a conspicuous leap in time, with the Seventies marking out how not many changes are needed to make a song interesting and worthwhile. In the finale, the atmosphere experiences splendid rhythmic alternations.

Sexy.

3 - SWIM

Initial atoms of Industrial and Ebm then become a torch contemplating sunshine and rhythmicity with the skin of psychedelia running alongside the beat, for a hypnotic dance that tattoos the short melody in the circle of eternity. Suicide would applaud, as would Front 242: from a minimalistic approach to an outdated era, Man of Moon colour instincts and drives with a riff that nails the wall.

Showy.

4 - VIDEO

In the penultimate single, we are thunderstruck by the perfect balance between rhythm and atmosphere, which seem like separate environments but with magical grafts that make us vibrate, giving us a feeling of great concern and melancholy, where reality is transported through this minimalist form of expression. With a tragic, frightening flavour, it could be the perfect soundtrack to an Akira Kurosawa film, as it allows fear to be an intelligent companion, using drops of Krautrock and shreds of psychedelia.

Devastating.

5 - TIME

It's up to the last single to define the maturation, the progression, the new visual and sensorial spaces that the band wants to manipulate, through a robotic form that contemplates a vocal that seems to cry without too much pain, giving us a strange sensation that is what makes us fall in love with this song, which is nothing more than a mysterious jewel that puts our time in disorder. 

Magical.

6 - THE TIDE

The initial approach takes us into the home of the Velvet Underground and then slowly escapes into the craters of a breathtaking suspension. With slowness, the duo's melody becomes an aurora borealis, an endless spectacle. And when a semi-acoustic track makes us magnets in a state of contemplation, then we can say that the band knows how to paralyse convictions, generating a splendid inner marasmus...

Hypnotic.

7 - IN THE WATER

Here's the combo that wrote the splendid Dark Sea reminding us of that album through a funnel of nerves miraculously held up by their charisma, by the undeniable ability to suspend atmospheres, to be the expression of a new melody in transformation, attaching a rhythmicity that drags without ever exploding.

Miraculous.

8 - REIGN

Neurotic, dramatic, explosive with style, a lunar beam coming out of its orbit, the song is a whiplash kissed by electric corals, an alternative that seeks links with electronics that appear but do not contaminate, to give the whole a feeling of modern sacredness.

Mysterious.

9 - MACHINE THAT BREATHES

The most incandescent tear comes out of magnetic notes of a piano that immediately makes us sink down and obedient, in order to listen to a sweet torment that springs from the whispered voice of Chris, here the magnet that stuns without any hesitation. It surrounds the senses with its almost resigned tone, a silken-gloved clap, transferring a pain seeking and gaining a sweetness as consolation...

Thunderous.

10 - RUN AND HIDE

Released in October 2021, the song knows a captivating retouching, a greater propensity for mysticism, a caustic prayer, an introverted preoccupation that arrives at the realisation of doubt about our survival, while the minimalist structure, with the final guitar to stun the bitterness, makes this composition the polar star that guides us towards our last chance of understanding...

Lunar.

11 - THE WILD

The greatest astonishment comes with the closing track, a genuflection that envisages an abnormal decadence, a vortex that resembles a hissing, with the notes of the piano keyboard (surrounded by a spectral synth that hypnotises the atmosphere) being a sad song that precedes Chris's, in a heart-breaking idyll, an outpost of a sadness that has no foothold but releases toxins in large quantities. A singing never before expressed, capable of being a swing in the wind, a going and coming back scratching our soul with a strange sweetness. Then its finale, chemical haze in transparency, offers us the ultimate punch in the face....

Ungovernable.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

18th May 2024

You can purchase it here:

https://manofmoonband.bandcamp.com/album/machinism-2

Written and Recorded by Man of Moon 
Produced by Man of Moon and Paul Gallagher 
Mixed and engineered by Paul Gallagher 
Mastered by Ryan Shwabe 
Artwork by Peter Kelly

La mia Recensione: Chants Of Maldoror - Ritual Death

 

Chants of Maldoror - Ritual Death

Un nido d’api abita nel cratere del cielo, a bordo di un veicolo che lo trasporta tra le diverse forme di ingresso in studi e perlustrazioni, e nel quale quattro insetti ci mettono a conoscenza di ciò che accade. Il tempo, gli spettri, gli andamenti tellurici, i sospetti, i drammi, il dibattito religioso, il rispetto della morte, gli assassinii, genuflessioni umane sapienti, i tranelli dell’esistenza: è solo l’inizio di questa esposizione di materia in ebollizione, dove il contenuto risulta essere un fascio sonoro che scartavetra gli spiriti e li rende liberi, mediante contaminazioni e fluidi apparentemente indigesti, con un nero che diventa la luce per vedere l’intensità di un processo che conosce l’evoluzione e il suo opposto.

Le quattro api di Frosinone e dintorni mettono su una cassetta il magnetico processo di miscelazione e processione di un incanto piangente, un attraversamento delle condizioni note e quelle meno note del dolore, della fascinazione simbolica cara a queste menti gravide di interessi, dando all’occulto, al sondaggio dei segni, alla bellicosa bolla di scoperte il compito di rendere il tutto una questione solo apparentemente legata alla musica. L’ascolto comporta il sacrificio del trambusto personale, una detumescenza inaspettata, un rito di guarigione inatteso, violento, mai approssimativo, all’interno di una manipolazione funerea che vede due generi musicali non essere il senso ma il mezzo attraverso il quale si mostrano le cose più che sentirle, dando così modo allo stupore di essere materia in esposizione, una nuova scusa per le porte delle percezioni per esibire un lungo vestito pieno di merletti di anime davvero capaci di non avere paura.

Sette candelabri dalla pelle ruvida vagano nelle corsie dello spazio facendoci sentire il loro respiro, in un groviglio di tensioni e dolori lancinanti che non cercano alcuna consolazione: si è talmente inebetiti davanti a cotanta intensità, introspezione, che pare, alla fine dell’ascolto, di aver vissuto una serie di miraggi in cui la volta celeste ha voluto consegnarci segreti pesanti ma necessari per la consapevolezza di una conoscenza divenuta, brano dopo brano, più che necessaria.

Benvenuti, allora, ai nipoti del Conte di Lautréamont, che depongono la loro ghirlanda sonica sulle assi di un teatro tetro, lancinante, pieno di schegge e artigli, nel quale il ritmo, la forma, la densità delle canzoni riempiono il tutto di orgoglio e devastazione. In Italia una simile qualità percettiva non aveva mai trovato modo di essere vissuta. Non è necessario catalogare, gettare queste sapienti creature nel calderone di stupide definizioni, bensì dovremmo tutti ritrovarci nella commozione di un viaggio psichedelico e alchemico attraverso un tempio scoperto, come un incanto che si fa toccare.

È inutile andare a fossilizzare la curiosità all’interno di cosa ci può far ricordare quello che ascoltiamo qui: mi pare piuttosto più corretto diventare anime studiose che vogliono catturare ogni atomo di questa chicca assoluta colma di unicità da riscontrare, tra sacrifici e spine sul capo del nostro cuore, mai affranto ma pulsante di stelle contenenti segreti in fase di emersione.

Adolphe, David, Echo e Loren sono gli emissari, i corvi di grotte in costanti eruzioni, gli artefici di questo vagabondaggio che rende le nostre orecchie tumulti continui, febbricitanti e timorose. Le loro mani, le ugole, le propensioni sono un ardire, una sfida, un concetto, una trama bellica che ci conduce alla verità che nella sua scomodità ci abbellisce con patemi abili nell’ungerci la pelle e il pensiero. 

Viaggiatori del tempo e di incognite, i Chants Of Maldoror sembrano spiriti millenari con una vitalità ineccepibile e straordinaria: malgrado la quantità di meteore esplose nelle loro mani, la scrittura è ordinata, concentrata, capace di un sorriso macabro ma stupefacente, un miracolo nel baricentro delle loro grazie, processate, messe in ordine ed esposte come esplosioni nel nucleo di metamorfosi continue.

Partiti come emissari del Medioevo, intenti a conoscere i rituali che fanno inorridire la maggior parte delle persone, questi ragazzi già adulti spostano le intenzioni e si tuffano in una volontà artistica che solo apparentemente appare più “comoda”: in realtà divengono ancora più devastanti, tremendi cavalieri di battaglie e scontri con i moti dell’anima, studiosi ribelli, indifferenti al circostante, splendidi concentrati di capricci e ostinazioni a cui noi risulta semplice essere ubbidienti, per trasferire la conoscenza nel processo dell’esperienza.

Una decadenza che si trasforma in un luogo dove la rassegnazione, limpida, conosce impeti, e la frustrazione riesce a trasformarsi in una meravigliosa gioia più che mai atipica. 

Lo spettacolo conosce regole, circospezioni, tumulti soffocanti, stati di perdizione, all’interno di una trama mai confusa ma che diventa insostenibile solo per gli ignoranti e per le menti volutamente superficiali. Pallottole, rovi, preghiere senza Dei da raggiungere, inchini e devozioni dai linguaggi complessi: questo è il regalo offerto dai quattro senza richiedere sacrifici ma facendoci notare, in ogni composizione, che l’ascolto può generare promiscuità e abbandono delle volontà, in un rapimento che non lascia sconfitti.

Il suono, lama di metallo dalla pelle resa acida dai dolori impenitenti, è il Re del tutto, il principale maestro, l’anticipo di ogni pendio che si vivrà attraverso sequenze di accordi e ritmi che creano un boato e una discesa continua, per ossigenare il centro della terra. Il crooning, il recitativo della voce, le tonalità che sono grovigli di sangue con i libri in mano, sono appannaggio di Adolphe, sacerdote del buio, studioso incontenibile, attore e regista di un teatro interiore che fa tremare. La sua qualità più evidente è fare della voce la perlustrazione di anime in viaggio, un alunno intuitivo scevro però di legami con chi lo ha preceduto, per potersi sistemare, indomito, sul trono della bellezza.

Loren è un alchemico della melodia, uno sperimentatore, un discepolo della bellezza nera, indomito, con un impeto pieno di sale e miscele, come un druido che studia gli elementi della natura e li trasferisce sulla sua sei corde.

Echo è una bolla sonora che si stende sui tasti bianchi e neri di un synth e di un piano, per regolare la temperatura del dolore e creare piani emotivi dove tutto è adiacenza, un patto di strutture che si sposano con le altre forme musicali, per conferire al tutto sacralità.

David è il governatore degli istinti, il portiere che apre il rumore della terra e lo porta dentro i meccanismi malefici di Loren ed Echo, un trapezista del suo strumento, che definire basso è totalmente riduttivo. A lui il compito di manovrare gli umori, di pilotare i fasci emotivi dentro il ventre, di stabilizzare le onde magnetiche di una band che sembra essere una orchestra del Settecento, priva di inibizioni.

Quello che stupisce maggiormente nella musica dei COM è che ci si ritrova davanti a pennellate di suoni sulla tela della vita, per un’arte che sembra diversa da quella musicale, come un fraintendimento che però unisce entità diverse. Un processo creativo che parcellizza le conoscenze nei confronti di stili ormai irrigiditi dall’adorazione, in cui manca il processo critico. I quattro, invece, non fanno Death Rock o Gothic Rock, bensì inumidiscono la conoscenza con dipinti che disintegrano ogni convinzione, ribelli armati di intelligenza per essere fragori non voluti dal Ministero di quei due generi musicali…

Disobbedienti e anarchici, i ragazzi entrano nel labirinto di ogni tensione per destabilizzare anni e anni di convenzioni che sanno rendere inutili. C’è una piacevole arroganza da parte loro: non essere sudditi, ma regnanti inconsapevoli…

Meraviglia, e non poco, che non si possa sprecare tempo nel cercare riferimenti stilistici e culturali con questo gruppo, in quanto ciò che si evidenzia è una tortura personale innanzi al noto, sfuggendo continuamente per poter elevare la conoscenza in un campo dove le novità possono essere raggiunte.

Preferisco immaginare questo combo all’interno di uno spazio culturale che parta dall’origine degli spiriti, di impulsi che elevano il genere umano, passando dal Medioevo, per trasferirsi nel cielo, in un tripudio di sensi che espandono una necessità simile a una malattia che vivono con positività, degni del bacio della morte che li osserva compiaciuta. Creano un tappeto di putride incombenze, appuntamenti con catene e artrosi mentali, nell’idillio di un ghigno che da malefico diviene digeribile.

Attraversando gli abissi, fissano i pensieri dentro un crocefisso mentale in cui tutto è inchino e stupore, per liberare ipnosi e magnitudini in modo costante.

Aduniamoci, sospettosi e tremanti, attorno a questi sette candelabri, per  mettere per iscritto, prima di adorarli, le nostre paure…

Song by Song

1 - Reunion and Death

“I sink the knife in the mother’s heart

and the capes grow scarlet from violet”

Cavità metallizzate, vapori e fuochi fatui entrano nella coda di un funerale emotivo con il recitativo di Adolphe che regna sulle scintille sonore gravide di allucinazioni provenienti dalla baia di San Francisco.

Molto più di un teatro del dolore: qui, sin da subito, ci si ritrova catapultati nel fragore di un abbandono dove lo smarrimento è dato da chitarre acide, con impeti nucleari.

2 - Feast In Black (Mortualia)

“My soul is in shards, in and out of the way spot of my skull”

La lotta degli abitanti dell’inferno diventa un sacrificio inevitabile, e la voce, che pare lontana per non farsi raggiungere, declama versi inospitali, la morte nel suo manifesto trionfo del momento del funerale consente alla musica di essere eterea ma ribelle, con il synth di Echo che dà l’idea di dipinti tetri e malinconici e il basso a scandire ogni paura…

3 - Post Mortem

“Restless shapes are dancing on the blade of my knife”

Immagina, in una notte piena di fulmini, i Virgin Prunes a cena con i Bauhaus, tra litigi e risate impertinenti, in oscillanti adorazioni di gesti violenti comandati dai COM con grande intelligenza. Cupa, greve, lancinante esibizione di scomodità uditive nel fruscio delle api che lavorano per detergere l’ignoto all’interno della paura. Lancinante parata di suoni che incollano al vetro viscido di coscienze in tumefazione… 

4 - Resurrection

“Resurrection is real death!”

Si va a Francoforte, a bussare alla porta della casa di Varney Cantodea, per vederla danzare felice, per questa composizione che arriva dal Settecento, mentre, dopo un bagno di modernità, si sacrifica in un movimento breve ma efficace. Si contesta, si riduce la religione a una miseria evitabile, si fa spazio alla verità millenaria perennemente negata e l’ovvio trova la luce manifesta della volta celeste. Ridondante senza distorsioni, la canzone è il miracolo della seduzione gotica al suo massimo livello…

5 - Baptism Until The Angel

“Doesn’t appear the lost image of the end”

Scosse nevrotiche, lame sul manico di Loren, gramigna nella voce di Adolphe, qui mago nero della morte, messaggero con le borchie nel cuore, mentre si lancia nei solchi del basso e della drum machine, con la chitarra che indaga e crea pertugi…

6 - Red Communion

“With Angels crucified on red roses in bloom”

Lo scenario cambia, ci si ritrova in una chiesa ipnotizzata da Echo, maestra e pittrice in avanscoperta: dopo pochi secondi il brano diventa una allucinazione sensoriale al cospetto della paranoia, per catturare il sonno umano e catapultarlo nel baratro del tempo. Marziale, oscura, impenitente e malvagia, la composizione  riduce al minimo la melodia e l’armonia per essere caos e genuflessione paralizzante…  

7 - Requiem Aeternum

Sull’eterno riposo la band scioglie una nuvola sonora che appanna l’udito e ci fa precipitare nello sconforto, in una ritmica che inchioda mentre la voce fa accapponare la pelle e la mente vaga persa nel limbo dell’ignoto. Suoni come cadaveri freddi, dove solo il basso alla fine sembra ricordarci che stiamo ascoltando qualcosa di “umano”.

Un congedo sorprendente che fissa il valore della band laddove nessuno se lo aspetterà, perché chi precede vive il lutto della incomprensione…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

12 Maggio 2024

Links song by song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlxCiH0yDMU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ps7VmXJjy4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA4O1Za6bVQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDyevx7xIWI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzBUMKnk63c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o6_mB18E2M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt-r54BtZ1o

My Review: Chants Of Maldoror - Ritual Death

Chants of Maldoror - Ritual Death

A bee's nest dwells in the crater of the sky, aboard a vehicle that transports it between different forms of entry into studies and patrols, and in which four insects make us aware of what is happening. Time, spectres, telluric trends, suspicions, dramas, religious debate, respect for death, assassinations, wise human genuflections, the pitfalls of existence: this is only the beginning of this exhibition of boiling matter, where the content turns out to be a sound beam that unleashes spirits and sets them free, through contaminations and apparently indigestible fluids, with a blackness that becomes the light to see the intensity of a process that knows evolution and its opposite.

The four bees from Frosinone and the surrounding area put on a cassette the magnetic mixing and procession process of a weeping enchantment, a traversal of the known and lesser-known conditions of grief, of the symbolic fascination dear to these minds pregnant with interest, giving the occult, the probing of signs, the belligerent bubble of discoveries the task of making it all a matter only apparently related to music. Listening involves the sacrifice of personal turmoil, an unexpected detumescence, an unexpected, violent, never approximate healing rite, within a funereal manipulation that sees two genres of music not being the sense but the means through which things are shown rather than heard, thus giving astonishment the chance to be matter on display, a new excuse for the doors of perceptions to exhibit a long dress full of lace of souls truly capable of not being afraid.

Seven rough-skinned candelabra wander the aisles of space, making us feel their breath, in a tangle of tensions and excruciating pains that seek no consolation: we are so inebriated before such intensity and introspection that, at the end of listening, we seem to have experienced a series of mirages in which the celestial vault has wanted to deliver heavy but necessary secrets for the awareness of a knowledge that has become, track after track, more than necessary.

Welcome, then, to the grandchildren of the Count of Lautréamont, who lay their sonic garland on the planks of a bleak, excruciating theatre, full of splinters and claws, in which the rhythm, the form, the density of the songs fill the whole with pride and devastation. In Italy, such a perceptive quality had never before been experienced. There is no need to catalogue, to throw these wise creatures into the cauldron of silly definitions, but rather we should all find ourselves in the emotion of a psychedelic and alchemical journey through an uncovered temple, like an enchantment that can be touched.

It is useless to go fossilising our curiosity within what can make us remember what we listen to here: it seems to me rather more correct to become studious souls who want to capture every atom of this absolute gem full of uniqueness to be found, between sacrifices and thorns on the head of our heart, never afflicted but pulsating with stars containing secrets in the process of emerging.

Adolphe, David, Echo and Loren are the emissaries, the ravens of caves in constant eruption, the architects of this wandering that makes our ears tense, feverish and fearful. Their hands, their uvulas, their propensities are a daring, a defiance, a concept, a war weave that leads us to the truth that in its uncomfortableness embellishes us with pathos that greases our skin and our thoughts. 

Travellers of time and unknowns, the Chants Of Maldoror seem to be millenary spirits with an impeccable and extraordinary vitality: despite the quantity of meteors exploded in their hands, the writing is orderly, concentrated, capable of a macabre but astonishing smile, a miracle in the centre of gravity of their graces, processed, put in order and exposed like explosions in the core of continuous metamorphoses.

Having started out as emissaries of the Middle Ages, intent on knowing the rituals that horrify most people, these young people who are already adults shift their intentions and plunge into an artistic will that only apparently appears more ‘comfortable’: in reality they become even more devastating, tremendous knights of battles and clashes with the motions of the soul, rebellious scholars, indifferent to their surroundings, splendid concentrates of whims and obstinacy to which we find it easy to be obedient, to transfer knowledge into the process of experience.

A decadence that turns into a place where resignation, limpid, knows impetus, and frustration manages to turn into a marvellous joy that is more atypical than ever. 

The show knows rules, circumspection, suffocating turmoil, states of perdition, within a plot that is never confusing but only becomes untenable for the ignorant and the deliberately superficial-minded. Bullets, brambles, prayers with no gods to reach, bows and devotions with complex languages: this is the gift offered by the four without requiring sacrifices but pointing out, in each composition, that listening can generate promiscuity and abandonment of wills, in a rapture that does not leave one defeated.

Sound, a metal blade from the skin made sour by impenitent pains, is the king of it all, the main master, the anticipation of every slope that will be experienced through sequences of chords and rhythms that create a continuous roar and descent, to oxygenate the centre of the earth. The crooning, the recitative of the voice, the tones that are tangles of blood with books in hand, are the prerogative of Adolphe, priest of the dark, irrepressible scholar, actor and director of an inner theatre that makes one tremble. His most obvious quality is to make his voice the scourge of travelling souls, an intuitive pupil devoid, however, of ties with those who have gone before him, in order to settle, untamed, on the throne of beauty.

Loren is an alchemist of melody, an experimenter, a disciple of black beauty, untamed, with an impetus full of salt and mixtures, like a druid who studies the elements of nature and transfers them to his six strings.

Echo is a sound bubble that stretches across the black and white keys of a synth and a piano, to regulate the temperature of pain and create emotional planes where everything is adjacency, a pact of structures that marry with other musical forms, to give the whole sacredness.

David is the governor of instincts, the gatekeeper who opens up the noise of the earth and brings it inside the evil mechanisms of Loren and Echo, a trapeze player of his instrument, which to call bass is totally reductive. It is up to him to manoeuvre the moods, to pilot the emotional beams inside the belly, to stabilise the magnetic waves of a band that seems to be an eighteenth-century orchestra, devoid of inhibitions.

What is most astonishing about COM's music is that one finds oneself in front of brushstrokes of sound on the canvas of life, for an art that seems different from music, like a misunderstanding that nevertheless unites different entities. A creative process that compartmentalises knowledge in relation to styles that have been stiffened by adoration, in which the critical process is lacking. The four, on the other hand, do not make Death Rock or Gothic Rock, but rather moisten knowledge with paintings that disintegrate all convictions, rebels armed with the intelligence to be unwilling fragments of the ministry of those two musical genres.  Disobedient and anarchic, the boys enter the labyrinth of all tensions to destabilise years and years of conventions that they know make them useless. There is a pleasant arrogance on their part: not to be subjects, but unwitting rulers...

It is a wonder, and not a little wonder, that one cannot waste time searching for stylistic and cultural references with this group, as what stands out is a personal torture before the known, continually escaping in order to elevate knowledge in a field where novelty can be achieved.

I prefer to imagine this combo within a cultural space that starts from the origin of spirits, of impulses that elevate mankind, passing through the Middle Ages, to move to the heavens, in a jubilation of senses that expand a disease-like necessity that they live with positivity, worthy of the kiss of death that observes them smugly. They create a carpet of putrid encumbrances, appointments with chains and mental arthrosis, in the idyll of a grin that from evil becomes digestible.

Crossing abysses, they fix thoughts inside a mental crucifix in which everything is bowed and astonished, to release hypnosis and magnitudes in a constant way.

Let us gather, suspicious and trembling, around these seven candelabra, to put in writing, before worshipping them, our fears...

Song by Song

1 - Reunion and Death

‘I sink the knife in the mother's heart

and the capes grow scarlet from violet’.

Metallic cavities, vapours and fatuous fires enter the queue of an emotional funeral with Adolphe's recitative reigning over the sonic sparks pregnant with hallucinations from San Francisco Bay.

Much more than a theatre of sorrow: here, right from the start, one finds oneself catapulted into the din of an abandonment where the bewilderment is provided by acid guitars, with nuclear impetus.

2 - Feast In Black (Mortualia)

‘My soul is in shards, in and out of the way spot of my skull’.

The struggle of the denizens of hell becomes an inevitable sacrifice, and the voice, seemingly distant so as not to be reached, declaims inhospitable verses, death in its manifest triumph of the moment of the funeral allows the music to be ethereal but rebellious, with Echo's synth giving the idea of gloomy and melancholic paintings and the bass scanning every fear...

3 - Post Mortem

‘Restless shapes are dancing on the blade of my knife’

Imagine, on a lightning-filled night, the Virgin Prunes dining with Bauhaus, amidst bickering and impertinent laughter, in swinging adoration of violent gestures commanded by the COMs with great intelligence. Gloomy, grim, excruciating display of auditory discomfort in the rustle of bees working to cleanse the unknown within fear. Lancinating parade of sounds gluing to the slimy glass of swelling consciences....

4 - Resurrection

‘Resurrection is real death!’

One goes to Frankfurt, to knock on the door of Varney Cantodea's house, to see her dancing happily, to this composition that comes from the 18th century, while, after a bath of modernity, she sacrifices herself in a short but effective movement. Religion is challenged, reduced to an avoidable misery, space is made for the perennially denied millenary truth and the obvious finds the manifest light of the heavenly vault. Redundant without distortion, the song is the miracle of Gothic seduction at its finest...

5 - Baptism Until The Angel

‘Doesn't appear the lost image of the end’

Neurotic tremors, blades on Loren's neck, weed in the voice of Adolphe, here a black magician of death, a messenger with studs in his heart, as he launches himself into the grooves of the bass and drum machine, with the guitar investigating and creating pertuosities...

6 - Red Communion

‘With Angels crucified on red roses in bloom’.

The scenery changes, we find ourselves in a church hypnotised by Echo, an advancing teacher and painter: after a few seconds the track becomes a sensory hallucination in the presence of paranoia, to capture human sleep and catapult it into the abyss of time. Martial, dark, unrepentant and evil, the composition minimises melody and harmony to be chaos and paralysing genuflection...  

7 - Requiem Aeternum

On the eternal rest the band dissolves a cloud of sound that fogs the hearing and plunges us into despondency, in a rhythm that nails while the voice makes the skin crawl and the mind wanders lost in the limbo of the unknown. Sounds like cold corpses, where only the bass at the end seems to remind us that we are listening to something ‘human’.

A surprising farewell that fixes the band's value where no one will expect it, because those who precede live the grief of incomprehension...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

12th May 2024

 

Links song by song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlxCiH0yDMU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ps7VmXJjy4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA4O1Za6bVQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDyevx7xIWI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzBUMKnk63c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o6_mB18E2M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt-r54BtZ1o