Daughter
Music from Before the Storm

We are at the dawn of a new era and a total revolution, so vast that it contains an enormous darkness, an apocalyptic knot to unravel to advance towards a new, necessary world to be urgently sought after. A world endowed with infinite possibilities for self-determination, self-defense, and preservation, entirely at the disposal of nations, societies, species, and each one of us. We will need to embark on difficult, solitary paths, get familiar with the void, the dangers, and the lights of galaxies, until we recognize the widespread suffering and innocence, in a universal and amplified recreation of passion. God is what you step on, what you observe, and what you constantly nourish yourself with. And you ignore it. In the future, perhaps despair and loneliness will make history. And then a tear or a smile might truly make a difference. Illuminate stretches of detrital sand and the newest seas. If it’s an uneasy and sensitive teenager living through this transitional moment, their inner soundtrack might very well sound like “Music from Before the Storm” by Daughter, released in 2017, just a year after “Not to Disappear” and four years after the beautiful debut “If You Leave.”

Before the Storm is the prequel to Life is Strange (2015), an episodic graphic adventure developed by Deck Nine Games, which has won over critics and the public, as well as a BAFTA (British Academy Television Awards), for its delicate and touching portrayal of the inner lives of young teenagers, particularly the sixteen-year-old Chloe Price and her best friend, Maxine Caulfield, facing real-life issues like bullying, suicide, drugs, and teenage pregnancies.

At a first glance, this could be defined as an indie or post-rock post-feminist album, conceived beyond the high wave of #metoo, in that new world where mini-series like Sharp Objects begin to shine (exploring and narrating female-inclusive universes and places, shadows, syndromes, and perversions). On a deeper, more universal level, it is music capable of outlining emotionally charged, intense soundscapes. Like clouds before the storm, indeed. To open subtle fissures in the uncertain fabric of our lives and times, through which to breathe, vent anger, or rather let it evaporate in the transversal sun of desolate and unexplored lands. Where to write, draw, play, listen to oneself. Stop. Where to explore and process even what comes before and after the storm, or between one lightning bolt and another. It used to be said that at midnight there is always a small gap between the day that ends and the one that begins, and a very agile person, able to slip through it, would escape time. In those suspended, electric moments, full of never truly kept and never really ignored promises, which are the provinces where dreams must necessarily manifest themselves, lies the true merit of the collection. In that void made available to not disappear.

Because we are the result of the desperate actions and dreams of previous generations, those of war, exterminations, economic booms, and industrial revolutions. We are the result of an endless series of sick, or distracted, neglected, forgotten, exterminated, postponed dreams. And perhaps only now, in the ’20s of the new millennium, can we truly begin to feel. To reposition ourselves beyond the enormous Chinese shadows that, in an emotional society like ours, generate anxieties and fears. And do so also through the restless, swift, sweet, reactive, angry, dazzled eyes of teenagers. Listening to their inner music. That is the sea we seek. Its fullness and its emptiness. Perhaps the only ones that can still truly inspire us. And not only because the language is so deteriorated that it is now difficult to find useful terms. It’s all part of the goal, making it impossible to speak (I always said I was a good girl/ I always said I was good with words/ I never thought I could be lost for words/ I don’t know how I’ll break this curse sings Elena Tonra in “Burn It Down”).

It’s about rubbing the sticks of our experiences against each other, and never stopping, certain that eventually, a spark will be born. This depends on us. On our nature. On our disposition and strength. If we have kept the fire alive within. Whether we tend to leave or return. It depends on the time we are taking. With how much violence and love, with how much sweetness things have been revealed to us.

It is a continuous search for balance between the parts, which here balance each other between unexpected, rhythmic, and decisive explosions (“Glass,” “Burn It Down,” “Dreams of William”), various instrumental passages -the lulling “Flaws,” “Voices,” which can recall the folk of Múm or the latest Sigur Rós, or “The Right Way Around,” a stretched and minimalist dialogue between a guitar, a bass, and a drum- cinematic sketches almost neo-classical (“Departure”) for lights, shadows, and whispering electric ghosts (“I Can’t Live Here Anymore”) and tracks where electro-folk songwriting returns, the romantic dark-wave, and the dreamy pessimism of the first albums (“A Hole in the Earth,” “All I Wanted”). The result is music for perfectly matching parallel universes, where every full is faced with the void it creates, and vice versa. Because there’s a hole in the earth here/ And we are walking around the edges.