Echolyn
Suffocating the Bloom

1992

The mirror is shattered. The dozens of pieces, larger and smaller, are scattered across a red carpet, woven and knotted by small hands. It is the red of roses, the more violent red of blood, and the fragments of the mirror, badly torn, bounce back the color of the sky into one's eyes, intertwining with the red as if to suffocate the gaze. It is the claustrum of man, his request to be enclosed and protected, in antithesis to the need to live and operate in ambiguous freedom.

The '90s, years of absolute revival of progressive, were marked by many happy islands within an anguishing, suffocating, oblique recording strategy that did nothing but demand songs to sell and music to peddle like diapers to infants. Among these happy islands, one of the most illuminated, one of those that never accepted compromises of any kind, that wanted - no matter the cost - to live the market on its own terms, is the one that responds to the name Echolyn. From Pennsylvania, five highly technical instrumentalists, endowed with those sublime capabilities that were once exalted by Billboard charts, capable of composing extremely complex pieces and presenting them as if they were pop songs, able to develop brilliant ideas by capturing the sprouts from plants sown twenty years earlier and - by strange cases - never bloomed. Authors gifted with unique intuitions, as elegant as a classical dancer and as powerful as a weightlifter.

This second album required an entire year of work, almost entirely spent on composition, and gives us more than seventy minutes of splendid ideas with the first part divided into ten distinct tracks among the rhythmic and vocal acrobatics of the opener "21", the overwhelming introspection of "Memoirs From Between", the sublime naive landscapes of "In Every Garden". There are often exercises of devotion to the vocal blend of Gentle Giant, certainly a reference group for the Band. Further sonic explosions and electroacoustic frenzies with "The Sentinel Chain", "A Little Nonsense" and "Cactapus". Then the second part: a super "Suite For Everyman" of over 28 minutes, divided into fragments of poetic beauty whose chromatic variety makes us understand how the lexical and musical generosity of Echolyn was a thing of the few. Overflowing emotions, energies that insinuate themselves tortuously into cerebral spaces, enriching neurons impoverished by the insipid sounds that those years offered through frequency modulations. A not insignificant detail is the high attention to the lyrics, biting, cultured, profound, and perfectly linked to the sonic progress of the tracks.

An album of research, an album of recovery. Research of suggestions and emotions and their recovery through a strong sensory stimulation, in a journey that will never conclude upon the first listen, requiring more and more, until that mirror of sensations narrated at the beginning is reassembled.

Sioulette.