Blessure Grave
Learn To Love The Rope

Music in fieri and current like every release that, to move forward, pushes from behind. The release (Learn To Love The Rope EP / 2009) by the Californian duo Blessure Grave is bristly, a couple dedicated to the abrasions of a multilingual and courageous death rock that, if well explored, gives an idea of how much music of the past has seeped into it. The couple presents themselves on the cover in an old-fashioned way, with decomposition colors, an anxiety-inducing central photo, and block letter typeface (at the top and bottom), reminiscent, for instance, of some works by Death In June and The Jesus And Mary Chain. There's more to say about the photo: they collectively resemble fairly standardized university outcasts, ex-metalheads, disillusioned punks, now asphyxiated and mortuary old-style death rockers. They show promise, both her, who seems like a sad and discouraged muse, and him, with an ectoplasmic face like a member of an evil youngster killer gang. An aesthetic of a probable couple only in these cases, surprisingly demonstrating their feet firmly planted underground throughout all five tracks of this work.

The detached, mechanical and low-fi atmospheres that stain this EP with sin seem like a discourse of a conscience wanting revenge on its owner, reproaching a life of frustrations. Frigid and martial, the noir western guitar from a metropolitan dead-end alley (better yet if you consider the crowd of neurons in a brain as a metropolis) accords limping and meaningful distortions to all the tracks, sometimes choosing classic melodies, while in other cases it keeps retrospectives alive by relying on new linear and suffered riffs like the journey of a larva within the tunnels it has created in a corpse.

The mechanical progression of each track is marked by a drum machine that has the effect of a real drum set played with dry forearm bones instead of proper drumsticks. Sometimes synth breaths fade into nothingness that speak of a life extinguishing. The overall portrayal is quite tragic and death-lit, where in the end, it is discovered that the lady in question is more of an adornment, a companion in this hopeless journey. It seems like experiencing a desperate walk along the green mile, perhaps this is why the release is invigorated by an imperceptible popular soul. She overlaps her voice with his. A him who knows what he's doing. The gothic vaults he is able to conceive do not adhere to the textbook tenets of gothic rock, but seem to want to align with the group of bands with a never clearly stated classification. Sounds and male vocals (truly a funeral rite performance) can indeed be immediately placed in the niche where Play Dead dwelled, with their never tame '80s furnace, never really bent to the goth definition; the other in the untainted sophistication of Ian Curtis in full fervor of Joy Division. Indeed, Blessure Grave's music appears as a raw distortion of Joy Division, enriched with some mannered trappings: troll-like apocalyptic references, baroque double vocals  and more. But don't forget the aridity, the idea of a surface on which nothing could grow except much anguish.

One to watch, the full-length may turn out to be a gem.