And Also The Trees
Virus Meadow

Much of the musical production of the '80s can be considered the result of a barbaric invasion hostile to the solipsisms into which the cultured and experimental rock of the previous decade had flowed. The punks were nothing but this, barbarians who, with their raids, left the new generations with the blank slate of reduction to zero. The guillotine. From their iconoclastic fury emerged a series of small tribes. There were the darks, the new romantics, there was noise and the (surviving) new wave, industrial, and so on. There were all these and many others. All more or less apocalyptic or integrated into the new reality that gave a decadent image of itself. The soft allure of a declining civilization, and so on.

Punk, all things considered, was a cool thing, the necessary cool thing that, cyclically, resets everything with explosions, punches in the face, and leaves the king naked and on the run. But it was above all a merry-go-round, and when it stopped, it left behind the most obvious feeling, which was one of disorientation. Ian Curtis had nothing to do but depress himself with his pitch-black, repetitive nightmares like those of a madman; the dark-punk aesthetic of Siouxsie claimed victims around every corner of the London underground; Robert Smith rose as a sublime idiot chasing those wonderful desolations that he later captured in the whines of Disintegration.

It was precisely his Cure who produced the first works of And Also The Trees, sharing several stages with them at the beginning of their respective careers. It was 1986, the year this album, "Virus Meadow," came to light, a small compendium of black-natured insights. Gloomy and at the same time hopeful about possible salvation. But for AATT, salvation was to be sought among the open and misty spaces of the English countryside, where the cousin Cure sought it among London's smoggy mists. "Virus Meadow" was the creature born from the humus already anthropized by the fashionable barbarians who advocated the contemplation of desolation scenarios. A decadent sensitivity, now à la page.

Here the atmospheres were enriched by the vocal theatricality of Simon Huw Jones, by his apocalyptic litanies. Then came the abundant, customary reverbs to counter the melodies and the often claustrophobic lyrics. There isn’t the dreamy air that will characterize all the future production of Smith and company. Here, rather, there is that esoteric air that would be picked up by the commendable and never listened to enough Red Temple Spirit: in the fourth track, "Vincent Craine," the closeness is clear, especially in the guitars. But it is the first track, "Slow Pulse Boy," that defines the orphic mood of the entire album, drawing the space between one horizon and the next. Jones, for the occasion, donned the robes of the priest and began to speak of explosions, veins like dark red rivers, of the liberation that comes from conquering open spaces. "Each explosion bounces from horizon to horizon." His voice is proudly amorphous. It is not singing but a sort of oration with a dark timbre.

In the end, the accumulated tension dissolves into a sensation of newfound serenity: "somewhere a girl singing/ there is a calm in the air/ but there is greater calm than I can bear/ tomorrow the sun shines." The flaws are to be found in the instrumental and instrumentalized use of synthesizers, in the naive and perhaps a bit cheeky way of winking at the mainstream of those years. The gothic episode of "the dwelling place" leaves the time it finds and detracts from a listening experience that would seamlessly flow more satisfyingly. But it's a very good album, this remains. It's not the paradigm of a mood or an era, but the modest and refined contribution of a band to be saved.