cLOUDDEAD
Ten

THE REVIEW

Psychedelic soot.

This could be the key to interpreting the new album by the three scattered post-modern music geniuses.
Electronic flickers of contagious beats disorient and unsettle, an inspired spoken word, at times, is abruptly severed by a beautiful pop vocal melody, but directed with ingenious and strategic eccentricity.
Elsewhere, an organ score is inverted and filtered, paced to lead to an epileptic and generally cerebral dance.

"Ten" offers, throughout the tracklist, small lo-fi symphonies that sway from graced and cursed hip-hop to American indie rock, from certain experimental pop (take, for example, Radiohead's Amnesiac) to devilish and creative ambient electronica worthy of the Warp catalog, particularly Boards of Canada.
Here, the equation sound=space sharpens with each listen. Something silences, cauterizes the upheavals for a moment, and rings sweetly, almost whispering, voices of drug-devoted aliens.

"Ten" is nothing more than the patient to whom cLOUDDEAD (yes, spelled just like that!!!), self-taught surgeons, promise care and devotion as close as possible to the ineffable. And so, just a little patience is required as the hallucinogenic pastiche suddenly gives way to a caress. An indispensable caress with the scent of violets. "Dead dogs two" is an uncontrollable round of digital dance and irresistibly catchy in the refrain (which almost inexplicably recalls the latest Yuppie Flu, but with more instinct).

But in the alluring cLOUDDEAD amusement park, there is also, never enough honestly, cinematic influences and sonic grains from Angelo Badalamenti (listen to "Rymers’s only room"), now rightfully among the most influential composers for musicians who approach certain specific atmospheres. And so, from the psychedelic diamond (“Son of a gun”) blooms an involuntary(?) homage to the darkest new wave in electronic sauce (“The velvet ant”); from multifaceted and less conventional Hip Hop (“Rifle eyes”) emerges a nursery rhyme of modern psychedelia (“Physics of Unicycle”) that fries in the warm spring air.

cLOUDDEAD enjoy radiant grace: they kill any model and category without leaving a trace and/or reference of their passage. They achieve the feat of being trend-killing serial killers while appearing enviably trendy. Fashion-wise. Thus, there are no words that can even remotely capture the clarity and reliability in describing this reservoir of ideas and concentration of madness (understood as artistic courage), but one thing is clear to me. This is a magnificent album (the first, and alas their last, great of the new year). One to lose sleep and one's mind over. And the fact that it is a crafted production (like gelato) makes it preferable without hesitation to certain exclusively mercantile artifices.