Death In June
Operation Hummingbird

The mini album "Operation Hummingbird", released in 2000, acts as a fitting appendix to "Take Care and Control" which, two years earlier, inaugurated the new (fourth?) artistic phase of Death in June: the folk of albums like "But, What Ends When the Symbols Shatter?" and "Rose Clouds of Holocaust" seems now a distant memory, while the music of Death in June retains only the apocalyptic moods and the disturbed psyche of Douglas P.

Pearce's travel companion is again Albin Julius, the mind behind the post-industrial project Der Blutharsch: the recording of an album ("Take Care and Control") and a tour faced together evidently benefited the two, who are cohesive and compact as ever.

In this brief but significant work (only 28 minutes in total!), our artists have the opportunity to refine and amalgamate, in form and substance, what was set up in the gloomy predecessor. And what we hold in our hands is certainly the most anomalous episode in Death in June's entire journey, almost as if at times it sounds like an album by Blutharsch!

The explosive opener "Gorilla Tactics" is, for example, the least Death in June thing that Death in June have ever conceived in their farsighted career: fired drum-machine, explosive samples, intangible vocalizations for not even two minutes of bile and venom where Douglas P. targets those "cuckoo heads" of the Swiss, guilty of having boycotted, two years earlier in Lausanne, a Death in June concert (a protest prevented the band from performing, and it's precisely to them that the track is dedicated, loaded with Pearce's proverbial sarcasm, reciting: "Their banks are filled with nazi gold, but Death in June's banned, I've been told").

And I must say, at least this is my impression, that the disillusionment that may arise from the right-wing sentiments inhaled fully along the entire album will soon be replaced by the enthusiasm stemming from the talent of the two artists and the undeniable expressive force of their representation.

"Operation Hummingbird" is actually the formal masterpiece of Julius, at the peak of his inspiration as a manipulator and assembler of sounds, never so attentive and surgical in his work of industrial butchery (a perfection we won't find even in his Blutharsch): perfect sounds, scholarly stratifications, dynamic and diverse compositions. And it is precisely to Julius' expertise that we owe the success of an album where Douglas P., increasingly short on ideas and decidedly uninterested in continuing his discourse (probably at the end of the line), prefers to sit in the director's chair: his voice and distressing visions will be the only connection to the band's past.

Seven jewels set in a compact and rigorous mosaic, a perfect machine where the meticulous attention to detail, the balance, and timing with which elements are placed make the difference; as if the psychic chaos of an album like "Wall of Sacrifice" was vivisected and transposed into an orderly and unassailable arrangement: a catastrophic and dreamy industrial, traversed by a latent subcutaneous tension.

Tones of nervous exhaustion, the firmness that contains everything, the bubbling madness inspired by it all: Pearce's indignation is a barely whispered murmur, it's rather the impetuous orchestrations, the apocalyptic choruses, the stridency of machines and industrial loops that shout. Civilizations collapsing, empires crumbling, eras dissolving in the dust of time and the void of everything: Pearce's inner world, the bitterness, and his emotional fraying translate into apocalyptic scenarios of unprecedented violence, leaden anthems ("Kapitulation"), solemn and tragic hymns ("Hand Grenades and Olympic Flames"), flashes of ironic detachment ("Let the Wind Catch a Rainbow on Fire").

A fresco with a thousand nuances that combines past and future, arcane charm and dark omens: a polished monument where the coldness of machines, the passionate procession of shredded and distorted orchestras, and the long shadows of a perverse ritual that restlessly slithers among the ruins coexist.

Douglas P.'s emotional material is too complex to be described in words: this small-great album, far from representing a secondary episode in Death in June's vast artistic production, deserves to be listened to with extreme attention and devotion.

Let us bow once more (the last time?) before the King of Apocalyptic Folk!