Controlled Bleeding
Music for Gilded Chambers

THE REVIEW

"...whitened city awaiting the unborn, uncertain form like a fire within the fire of a New Prehistory."

Pier Paolo Pasolini.

At the dawn of the new prehistory, Controlled Bleeding watched from afar, like new Nero watching the city burn, while the crimson sky was stained with waves of black soot...

Unholy liturgies, iridescences, ancient temples flooded with incense smoke, shining mosaics, amber and gold...

The marble structure of each piece crumbles into fragile and intimate crystalline melodic constructions, the sound appears overburdened, vital and tense, without falling into traps such as excessive smoothness and sonic clarity, the austere, cold, and wonderful pairing that opens and closes the work, "Confirmation (Part One)" and "Confirmation (Part Two) - Germany" towers sculptural and triumphant, never before in this album has Joe Papa's mighty operatic voice been more of a protagonist, at its absolute interpretative peak.

One must drown in these sounds, endure them passively...in "Byways" suspended airy echoes support mesmerizing and fluttering vocalizations, "Tides Of Heaven" seems suspended between noisy contortions and shivering melodic caresses, there is the pianistic intimacy consecrated to the decadence of "Scourging Ground", in "Healing Time" the sublime noise hammering becomes gloomy, challenging, disfigured by soaring and solemn peplum-style sonorities.

"Faith", "A Silken Barb" and "The Vigil": steep melodic draperies adhering to unknown codes of beauty, solemn and deadly in their emphatic, grandiose advancement.

The naked and all-encompassing sacredness of the "new prehistory"... a burnt shroud soaked in ether and stained with sperm, covered by scarlet roses.