Envy
A Dead Sinking Story

Introduction: Yes, okay, this review is long. So what? I apologize to those who have little time to read it all, but there was no way I could condense it or skimp on words for an album as important to me as this one. I don't care if the review seems exaggerated and biased: I write a review every 3 months if all goes well, so let me vent for once... The album deserves it.

"The sound of words so quiet and mellow.
A dead sinking story we can't take back."

There is a line that separates the conception of art from the surface of the human soul, and this line is thin, very thin. So thin that the former often can pierce it and touch the latter. Am I perhaps saying something foolish? I don't think so... Otherwise, why would I be the only one experiencing certain sensations and emotions when I enjoy a work resulting from human ingenuity, lost in its contemplation to the point of tears and fainting. Instead, it is something that happens to the entire humanity. Do we need to evoke Stendhal syndrome and the Kantian sublime to describe what an album can evoke in the listener? Fortunately, no, so I will resort to simpler words to express what I felt listening to Envy, and this album in particular.

What I want to emphasize is the concept of emotional involvement. Hasn't everyone experienced being moved by a film to the point of tears, feeling their eyes glisten? Who hasn't ever felt deep inside that the song they're listening to at that precise moment has become one with their own heart? Yet we can watch a movie at the cinema while munching on popcorn, and we can listen to a band live, or even a nice CD, comfortably seated in a venue drinking beer with friends. When, then, does emotional involvement become so strong that we can no longer consider artistic creation as something external to be absorbed with detachment? When do we feel it becoming part of us, as if it were a concrete translation (music, images) of those non-concrete and indefinable emotions we feel and need to express? Well, it happens when that thin line I mentioned before is broken. And never has this been made clearer to me than when I listened to "A Dead Sinking Story" by the Japanese band Envy.
What do you want to call it? Screamo? Emo-violence? Hardcore? Post-Hardcore? Post-Rock? This is emotional music in its purest form, and there are no adjectives or words in the world capable of describing emotions to a human being who has never experienced them. But a review is built with words and descriptions, and I will be forced to use them if I want to try to express to those reading what I felt during the listening.

Let's start from the beginning: the first song of the album, "Chain Wandering Deeply". Initially, it sounds like listening to a guitar arpeggio trying to create a decaying atmosphere, while a background noise rises more and more like a black cloud slowly obscuring a crystal-clear sky on a winter night. But from this cloud, at a certain point, a bolt of lightning strikes: the flash of lightning, the rumble of thunder, the earth trembling, everything is disrupted by the arrival of something that disturbs the peace that had been created. That's what happens after the first few seconds of the song. As soon as Fukagawa's voice and the guitars of the Kawai/Tobita duo intone the first note, everything is already clear, lucid, inevitable. The album has become part of you. You can't escape, there's no way to flee from your emotions. Remaining insensitive would be like denying oneself. The song has just started for a few seconds and a cold shiver is already felt starting from the ears and reaching the heart. "Atemo naku samayou kotoni tsukare / motome iku jijitsu dakare ushinai"... No matter how harsh and incomprehensible the Japanese language is, Fukagawa's verses (of which there is an English translation in the CD booklet anyway) become one with us, scraping the surface of the soul, while a guitar riff repeats itself twisting on itself, building enveloped in emotion, it feels like seeing the band collapsing to the ground and us with them, bleeding as if hit by a bullet to the heart shot from the sky to make us vulnerable and aware of our human nature. It's a disconcerting riff, never guitars and voice have been so abrasive and intrusive in making their way into the listener's unconscious, bursting with violence and destroying any detachment and self-preservation that we had built in front of the work of art. If an album capable of evoking such emotions is not a masterpiece, then what is? The song continues and the guitars slow down, the voice relaxes and draws scenes of pure post-rock decadence, but then the riff repeats, even more dangerous and destructive, a heartbreaking scream hurled at our chest involving heart, mind, and soul, making despair tangible in a scream that stands out to the sky with no one to welcome it. And the riff at a certain point breaks, gains a hardcore color, before plunging back into a new ocean of notes that overlap with conflicting feelings, as if wanting to scream the confusion to which they are forced by life, which never makes things simple and never lets us understand what we truly feel. Everything is clear, emotion is palpable, music is just a tool to translate a feeling into something concrete, expressible. First, the guitar riff seems to instill hope and the major tones rise more and more, it almost seems like there's a sweetness underlying the sonic violence, but then we collapse on minor tones and it seems as if all that hope built before has been broken by a gust of wind, by the first great difficulty; we find ourselves again in front of pain, the deepest despair, in a visceral tornado involving every part of our body.

It feels like watching a movie, a fresco of emotions, like a father playing in the park with his child and feeling truly happy, having found the meaning of life, until the laughs are broken by the firing of a gunshot, and the silence of a bloody face and the child's body collapsing into the arms of the father paralyzed by the pain that struck suddenly. Like a murderous arrow that destroys and makes us feel the vulnerability of a joy we believed to be concrete. I hope I haven't created an image too out of place, but I haven't found a better comparison to describe what this music can evoke, if the listener is willing to completely give themselves to it. Everything is extreme, everything is brought to excess, everything is blood red. That Japanese passion is felt, which we find in manga, anime, Asian cinema, and all those works where the exaggeration of passion is the pivot on which artistic creation moves, conveyed with hardcore violence into our soul like a torrent in flood plunging into the ocean.
The post-rock atmosphere created at the end of "Chain Wandering Deeply" evolves into "Distress Of Ignorance", continuing the alternation of feelings, through notes that evoke melancholy as well as sweetness, sensations of bewilderment but with someone pointing the way. The emotional brutality resurfaces in "Color Of Fetters": Fukagawa screams a word for every guitar chord, and so the riff rises and wraps in a destructive spiral, a tornado of emotions that forcibly drag mind and heart before developing into something more, into a penetrating atmosphere that seems uncontrollable. Everything is so fast that there's not even time to understand what emotions are felt while listening: it's obvious that my description was made with hindsight. The riffs played at the beginning of the song are recalled but presented in a new guise, with an awareness of their visceral power. And so they transform into a delicate arpeggio that closes our eyes and invites us to dream. All before the wild screamo of "Unreparable Gentleness" makes its appearance, crushing our already weary senses, singing pain and confusion. But then, a ray of light appears on the horizon and envelops the senses with gentleness. Pain then gives way to hope, or at least to a poetic melancholy, which is expressed in the atmospheres of "Go Mad and Mark" and especially in the arpeggios of "Reasons And Oblivion". And it is precisely with this last song that one realizes how screamo is a genre capable of expressing emotions better than many others, for how the notes become tangible with human fragility, a mystical symbiosis between the work and the creator/user, between what appears outside and what we feel inside, drawing an eternal equation pain = poetry.

Even the finale "A Will Remains In The Ashes" seems to want to continue the already started path of melancholy, but then it turns out that it is nothing so trivial. The riffs that close the album are like gusts of freshness, like two hands flinging open the window shutters and letting the sun into the room. They gather the glass shards destroyed by the tornado of the first songs, and with much hope within themselves, recompose the picture, close the circle. Everything has an end, and this journey is also over.
Many albums, too many indeed, have generated conflicting sentiments and destructive emotions in me, involving me head to toe. But it has to be clarified: such violent emotional involvement as that generated by "A Dead Sinking Story" is something rare in the world of music, and for this reason, a gem like this should be preserved and spread as much as possible around (did someone say "Italy"?). Even the voice, which at first seemed boring and monotonous to me, always screamed and with the same timbre, becomes conceptually fundamental, accompanying the guitar riffs to give a tangible form to the heartbreaking despair they can provoke. A dark and painful album, that breaks the distance between us and what we listen to, making us one thing, as if it had entered our soul permanently. An unsurpassed mastery, all Japanese, in playing with human emotions in a harrowing and destabilizing way.

Be brave and break this line too. One more album to realize (for real) how surprisingly similar two concepts like music and emotion can be. Pure contemplation, mystical symbiosis, orgasm.