Black Marble
Bigger Than Life

A warm and intimate ray of sunshine appears in the music of Black Marble, so intimate that it seems like one of those that filters through the polished glass of the window and aims at your still sleepy face while you're in a cloud of a bed from central or northern Europe, early in the morning. A ray of sunshine that wakes you up well, despite the moods being those of an inner spiritual retreat. A ray of sunshine that induces you to a hot tea with cookies, while your wooden house regains color and outside, nevertheless, the inevitable cold gray of the ice dominates. In 2012, I advocated for their A different arrangement as the album of the year. In 2019, I won’t do the same, but I do enjoy being wrapped in a wool blanket and savor this leap from the sterile cold wave with rather dark hues to this synth-pop, where the human factor dominates, even if in a pinpoint manner, the spaces reserved for it in the compositions. It seems that they have finally completed and finished the research journey on the ethics of time. Their chronicle-like punctuation renders them very much like authors from early 20th-century Italy to me, while their intentions always seem Proustian with the sensations they evoke, much like those from reading the masterpieces of à la recherche du temps perdu.

This is certainly not an act aiming to assert itself through European literature. In fact, the Black Marble probably know nothing about this, but having the capability to generate these thoughts is a merit for anyone making music, and there are several merits in this album. The first is making me recall the home-to-work commute I did in the snow when I lived abroad listening to the New Order, and everything passing by exalting itself in the white, coloring it cheerfully. The other, without a doubt, is the ability to create inescapable melodies, geometrically concave. In the breath of a second, you can nevertheless perceive the warm and intoxicating light, capable of making your whole life flash before your eyes, while the music base that extends throughout the release creates an overall unwelcoming context. The fact remains that in such a well-defined soundscape, this time the spaces intended for human use increase with all their bouquet of feelings, to experience a unique memory alone.

A third merit is a voice capable of completely capturing my attention. While remaining faithful to the style of singing, the outlines become more feeble and rarefied, less authoritative in their dramatic storytelling capability. Try taking the pictorial skills of Renoir and turning them into a voice. A daring experiment and by no means simple to conceive but it might give the idea. Aside from the dark tones, you can also see the light ones, marking a clear emergence of memories that can return to light within the realm of contemporaneity. Which is there, outside, ready to offer waste in which to wallow, thinking that despite everything, it’s not so bad after all.

Overall, it’s not at all a masterpiece. Not every track is perfectly successful. But the artistic journey of Black Marble is worth following because it helps you understand, in absolute terms, where now outdated genres gifted to the famous posterity will end up. Here they are, the posterity.