Alex Delivery
Star Destroyer

Do we listen to music with our head or with our heart?   

One might be tempted to answer "with the ears", but that would be an ironic response meant to avoid a long-standing discussion. Are the emotions produced by listening to music due to almost physical impulses or the cerebral workout it subjects us to? Is it better to have minimal techno, the avant-garde of La Monte Young, or a kick in the backside garage punk, or a blast of '80s metal with no-frills, take it or leave it?

It's obvious that both types of music coexist and therefore both types of listeners as well. Or music and listeners that naturally sit halfway and favor everything. I consider myself a listener of the "center-heart" wing. Music, no matter how cerebral, has to give a minimum of physical stimulus, whether it's a tingle in the ocular bulb, an unexpected diarrhea, or pain in the Eustachian tubes. So why talk about a band I already knew was quite cerebral? I don't have the answer, perhaps a mania for completeness, obsession with downloading, an obsessive search for something "other" and "different". The fact is that after months I found this album in the dark recesses of the hard drive and decided to give it a careful listen. And the gentlemen have something to say.

Based in NY, but musically quite stateless, Alex Delivery is part of a group of current bands that, by surpassing barriers and genre boundaries almost by vocation, have ended up creating a genre and sound "of their own". The Animal Collective comes to mind as an open approach, but musically, if we are not at the antipodes, we are close.

One is like Brian Wilson perpetually tossed between acid narcolepsies and bursts of childlike joy, the other like depressed Kraftwerk trying to convey warmth and emotions through machines. It's a tough task because at first glance "Star Delivery" feels like a dark and almost claustrophobic listen. In the first 4 minutes, the initial "Komad" is suffocated under layers of looped sheet metal and drum cans, an otherwise ethereal and dreamy vocal melody, only to transform into an organ gallop similar to Neu!. The subsequent "Rainbows" is even more improbable, with its pastoral tone of a Christmas album, also subjected to a violent glitch electronic treatment. The continuation is no less: the tour de force"Sheath-Wet" travels on '80s synth rails, occasionally slowing down to stop at some bucolic station in the Ruhr, the epic ballad "Vesna" is constantly whipped by mighty electronic winds, the circus melody of "Scotty" is punctuated by disturbing sampled explosions. Only in the 10 min. of "Milan" do they seem to seek (and find) a certain inner peace, managing to compose a "cheerful" melody.

As mentioned, this is an album that certainly belongs to the intellectual and cerebral sphere of music, but with a remote tempered steel core well hidden between the sheets, warm and reassuring from the inside, bearer of small and faint emotions. A bit like feeling like a child again, curled up in a room under grandma's blanket.