Diabolique
The Black Flower

"Take me away, away from tears

From this hall of gray stalactites

Toward crystals of blinding lights

And I tremble with the fragility of new seductions

With hair drenched in liquid sadness

And eyes that burn subdued

Let me admire intact flights

Of white owls and snow grouse

Abandon me in the ice castle

To avidly kiss solitary lips

With eyes stretched toward the eternal eye...

The winter sun that melts the waterfalls of unease

Like a river of burning passion in the darkest days.."

A bath of sonic delicacy tenderly grips the heart, leaving it to pound wildly in solitude. "The Black Flower" is the song of the defeated, the lament that instead of shouting barbaric revenge, sinuously floats through the meanders of thoughts and dreams lost forever, a spade with a handle carved in unbearable melancholy ready to sink into the dark earth of the coldest months.

We descend into the gallery of blurred images with Kristian Whålin's voice, deep like a black velvet tunnel, sweetened by the nostalgia of love never known but capable of becoming baritone and pale dark in moments steeped in gloom. The North-European singer's throat duets with watery guitars, drawn to oblivion by ethereal misty, distorted, contorted, dissonant lullabies embraced by immobile, weary, repetitive rhythms.

In the feast of sonic shyness, compositions sink into amorous desires, feminine glances reflected in the purity of springtime puddles, tenderness rooted in dream-pop desperately clinging to dark-rock/metal textures that bring the Gothenburg quartet close to perfection. The gentle keyboards of "Yesmine" hint at a cold caress of compassion to muddy guitar tunes, paving the way for the voice of the Scandinavian graphic-painter who intones the national anthem of the disconsolate, weeping for the seductive figure of an elusive and intolerably fascinating woman.

In the windy "Eternal Summer," Diabolique reach the emotional pinnacle, leaving us alone in the leaden skies of late August, alone in the rain that pours, tinkles, beats on the wounds of nostalgia for a smiling yet lost past, stretched toward the black clouds of polar storms. The arpeggio cries vehemently, collapses on the barely hinted riffs, struggles among the burning melodies, and extinguishes in the autumnal silence.

"A golden girl from somewhere"...the dream of golden curls, the crystal of green-blue eyes that leaves one breathless, without space, without tears. And the nails scrape the raw earth while the mind journeys on the harmonies of an elegantly clung neoromantic ballad to betrayed feelings.

Descend into the grayness of love soaked in morphine that dulls the sonic sobs of this gothic creature wrapped in reddish heathers, you won't regret it.