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Rating: There are works that transcend the very sense of an artistic work, there are works in every known art form capable of unleashing exorbitant emotional surges, of capturing the perfection of the moment and propagating that same moment to infinity, of rendering eternal the aesthetic and emotional perfection inherent in them.
The album of broken symbols by Death In June fits perfectly into this Olympus of enlightened works of art, adhering perfectly to every tenet of what can be defined as a masterpiece, each composition shrouded in the burning light of a thousand flaming twilights, of heroic and eternal marble breaths. It is the album of rebirth, both for Death In June as a formation and for Douglas P., redefining and bringing to completion a sound, the Death In June sound, a unique and deeply personal sound from its beginnings as a band to the times when the grand artistic design of DIJ was carried forward by Douglas Pearce alone.
The work that ensues radiates with new light the deathinjuneian endeavor and at the same time is a faithful continuation of its intents, its solemn austerity and its sublime crystalline clarity are the very core of a refuge from the world's baseness, the decadence and darkness that has always surrounded Death In June's work are present here, yes, but in a different way, overcome as they are by an intrinsic life force immersed in a growing darkness. It is right in the center of this darkness that the work begins, with that journey at the peak of the night that is “Death Is The Martyr Of Beauty,” with its shining melodies, twilights of ice, and Douglas P.'s singing both heartrending and wonderful at the same time, among acoustic arpeggios and cryptic harmonies chiseled in instrumental and lyrical structures brimming with melancholy. The album proceeds, one after another rising in all their pure beauty are the tracks, from proud and heroic (yet fragile and intimate) wonders like “Because Of Him” and “The Golden Wedding Of Sorrow,” to Morricone-like surges of immense austere rides “He’s Disabled,” “The Mourner’s Bench,” and “Little Black Angel,” golden electroacoustic mosaics endowed with immense vitality and innate expressive strength, touching emotional peaks at times heartrending. Then there are the rarefied and enchanted atmospheres of “The Giddy Edge Of Light” set in immobile and icy scenarios, or even the vocal surges of the title track, clad in epic and resounding luminescent melodic diadems.
Friend David Tibet (Current 93) marks with his dissonant singing the precious “Daedalus Rising,” dreamlike and gentle, airy and melancholic, Tibet's painful and sometimes shrill singing is the opposite of Douglas P.'s oracular baritone, yet it fits perfectly with the deathinjuneian musical art, but perhaps the absolute pinnacle of this masterpiece will remain forever “Hollows Of Devotion,” that extraordinary elegy to dreams, chiseled between golden instrumental surges, embedding lacerating emotionality and extraordinary lyrical exploits, it is crystalline and dreamlike, it is coral and mother-of-pearl, with those towering trumpet blasts truly immense and totalizing and a sublime song grafted onto the touching melodies.
This chest of broken symbols is a key album for the history of Death In June, and also one of the brightest examples of all that music should be.
Tracklist Lyrics Samples and Videos
02 He's Disabled (04:08)
As pilgrims here - we sometimes journey
To who know what - to who know what?
Come and sing this simple story
That god forgot - that life forgot
Don't you know god is disabled
Is disabled
Clouds may gather all around you
But he's disabled
He's no friend to the friendless
And he1s the mother of grief
There's only sorrow for tomorrow
Surely, life is to brief
Surely, lovy is to brief
Don't you know god is disabled
Is disabled
Clouds may gather all around you
But he's disabled...
09 Ku Ku Ku (01:52)
Open up you mind
And ku ku ku, baby
And time will stand still for you
Seize the end of time
And ku ku ku, baby
See, it will be mine
And ku ku ku, baby
I will bleed into the blind
So ku ku ku, baby
And time will stand still for you
Open up you mind
And ku ku ku, baby...
10 This Is Not Paradise (05:27)
Many blurred dead king's faces
Move photolike through time's gape and gauge
The dull drum's thud and drone
Is not heroic battlebeat
This is the grey clock's cog
There are not the banners of heroes
Or flags we should fly
These are not proud pennants
These are the clothes of prisoned mind
These stumps of man on boxes
Are not the vox or voces
Of god or gods
They are the forms of the breaths of dust
This is the great ocean of birth and death
Kye ma kya ma
Oh paradise
Never lost and not to be gained here
These are not the heroes
These are not more than drenched earthtops
These are not more than you or I
Listen:
I swear by the blank of the moon
(Under the archen stars I stand alone)
I swear by the spiting sttreaming sun
These cups of fire, of waterred scales
That cover our laughing round of spaces
Are nothing
Nothing
Like tho mouse with horns
A fable full of lightless dark
You are now to me the lost queen
The new age and her train moves on
Behind the smiling lips concealed
The clacking jaws of gummy rictus
Not motionless but motionless
The savourless lines of open lies
Proclaim:
"This is a bes
It shall ever be
Think of the things
That shall never be"
And our soul stalks empty hearted
Empty-handed
As it hangs its light
On hooks of symbols
Hooks of gods and goath and hooks of crooks
You must know: this is not paradise
Father time spins on and grins and skips his
Scythe
Over our flowered heads
And takes us to the muddy house
Of dreamless sleep
Oh this is not paradise
All the empty buildings clutching
Bags of pain and bone and skin
Masks of despair and waterbruns
The bells ring out and make no sense
They make the skies bend
Through you wait for me
This is not paradise
(Through you wait for me)
This is not paradise...
11 Hollows of Devotion (03:29)
And I shall your eyes
Into tears
When all that's left
Are the hollows of devotion
And, out of vision
We shall bring
The void
Crowned with hoods
And crying with hope
Eagle on arm
And terror in eye
Resist and struggle
Your faith is a lie
And, the death of dreams
Shall be a beautiful end
With flowers of filth
And wine and fine men
Certains slips of the tongue
Are laced with disappointment
With disappointment
From start to end
Confront me with your dream
And lives so cruel I curse
And, I shall turn your eyes
Into tears
When all that's left
Are the hollows of devotion
And, out of vision
We shall bring
The void
Crowned with hoods
And crying with hope
And, the death of dreams
Shall be a beautiful end
With flowers of filth
And wine and fine men
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Other reviews
By mementomori
A mature artist who is aware of himself, his means, and the reality surrounding him.
This track... constitutes the true peak of the album, a song of resignation and perdition that carries the unbearable weight of the void of 'a life without God, of an end without Love'.
