Circle Takes the Square
Decompositions: Volume One

Gather in your mind the variety, the punch (and the DIY) of post-hardcore, the emotional chaos of screamo, the arrogance and synthesis of progressive, the tones of post rock, the guitar outbursts of black and grindcore, and vocal influences akin to death. Now try to imagine a possible meeting of these continents. It's impossible: the meeting point is an immense, unbridgeable chasm. Here, this album is a leap with clenched teeth and exposed claws, straight into the heart of that abyss. It’s clear that the band will never reach the other side. They can’t make it. They lack the necessary strength. But damn, what a great leap.

A breathless album, frantic, launched in a mad rush that it cannot stop. Too many changes, variations, rhythmic metamorphoses conducted with feral precision by these four totally normal people. Too deep and esoteric the themes, which deal with the various forms of annihilation of the self, structured even in two inner chapters of the album, and in three further narrative cores, including the initiation rite, or rather that "altered state" in which the individual, expelled from society, finds himself, alone and inexperienced, facing a test that will lead him to adulthood and acceptance, an unknown, atavistic test, for which he is unprepared. All of this is sublimated by the aphorism "One must suffer to pass" (which, besides being one of the very few phrases repeated twice throughout the work, whose lyrics are truly endless, reassuringly resembles the maxim of Someone...). The other two themes, the rebellion against divinity and the consequent annihilation, and the oblivion of self in view of a higher ideal, are mostly intertwined and find their conclusion in the final North Star, Inverted, an inevitable melodic explosion after the intricate forest of distortions that precedes it, a lunar ballad that should unravel the interpretative knots and instead tightens further the mind's ties. The album offers no easy foothold, using a comparison it is a sight climb, with decidedly absurd points, almost horizontal (Way of Ever-Branching Paths). It's a pure and continuous succession of ideas, of guitars multiplying, of choruses splitting, of intricate and shifting riffs, whose rare references signal a thematic connection. There's no escape, the attack is 360° and the group's technical ratio is at its maximum, particularly the singers, man and woman, with their own unique "fused" tone of clean, scream, and growl independently from each other, in their angry calls and responses, it’s truly terrifying to think that at the same instant they are playing - and what they are playing.

Here, I’d like to say a few words about Drew and Kathleen, the heart of the band. Zero tattoos, stretchers, studs, zero nonsense. A kind gaze. You'd never say they play hardcore. To say, the lovely Kathleen (my personal bass totem) works in a restaurant to get by. I find it absolutely crazy that I could go to Saint Simons Island and order two cheeseburgers from a blonde who plays music like this in the evening with the band. Yes, because to leave aside the discourse "they are like us” Circle Takes the Square took eight years to make this album, without ever giving up, without ever stopping to add details to details, to apply improvements to very complex pieces, and all this probably in one of their garages. They have invested money, time, energy. This is called dedication; and it would be something common to all bands if it weren't that they, after eight long years of work, put this immense effort in free download. This is nobility, it is love for their art. For this reason I say, let’s do them a favor, let’s listen to this album. Because they ask nothing else. But let’s not expect to understand it right away, in one or two listens, after all the sweat they’ve put into it. That would be arrogance.