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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.
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