Father Murphy
Anyway, Your Children Will Deny It

LA RECENSIONE

Is it possible that on the "coolest site on the intern??t" there is no review of the discussed discobolus? Yet, these Father Murphy would greatly appeal to the average debaserian, a cult reality of the tricolored alternative underground, backed by an intense concert activity (a field in which they have been able to attract most of their followers) and the unconditional appreciation from specialized press and the snobbiest critics.

"Anyway, Your Children Will Deny It," published in 2012, is to date the latest discographic effort from this ensemble, active for about ten years and with about five publications behind them. Federico Zanatta (aka Rev Freddy Murphy), the group's founder, and Chiara Lee and "Vicar" Vittorio Demarin are the names behind the project. What might the three of them propose to us? Difficult, very difficult to say: noise?, psychedelia?, avant-garde?, funereal blues? The fact is that their music is intangible, it's not clear what instruments are being played, what the nature of the percussion is, who is singing, who is playing what. What is a fact is that in just eight tracks and only twenty-nine minutes they manage to build a post-apocalyptic setting that finds no equal in recent music history. Swans come to mind, Einsturzende Neubauten of course, the very first Cave, the gloomy litanies of the priestess Nico, in the most listenable moments something of Black Heart Procession's post-blues, but without taking away from the masters, Father Murphy builds something truly original, difficult to find these days and especially in our parts.

What do these three have more than others? Certainly, a expressionist verve that allows them, through a few heavy and incisive brushstrokes, to outline sketches of unequivocal eloquence. A rough anarchy balanced by a gloomy ritualism that spiritually elevates a music crawling in the mud of senselessness. A thorny music, theirs, dirty, annoying at times (consider how the instruments are violated), but never gratuitous or self-indulgent or worse still self-referential. Because Father Murphy also have the gift of synthesis, and although their music is also psychedelic, they do not like to indulge in redundancy and the easy temptation to drift towards the superfluous. They need little, much less, the creaks of confusedly played guitar, distortions and effects, the entrance of an obfuscating church organ, the gloomy procession of menacing orchestrations, the dark tolling of percussion, the alternation of voices, male and female, overlapping and contrasting like cries of suffocated pain of self-standing monads. And so "Anyway, Your Children Will Deny It" is yet another dirty ritual that dark music delivers to our ears: however, it is interesting to note that one of the most emotionally lacerating albums of recent years is the result of the work of a band that does not consider industrial, dark, or simply gothic music as its cultural background (ah ah ah – laughter in the background).

Yet a track like "Their Consciousness" gives chills with how macabre it is, with how tragically solemn, with how it intends to delve into the listener's flesh. But if the aforementioned track (the sixth to be exact) is undoubtedly the peak in terms of intensity of this ritual, the other seven episodes contribute, despite their diversity (the cadaverous blues of the opener "How We Ended Up with Feelings of Guilt"; the deviant electronica of "It is Funny, It is Restful...Both Came Quickly"; the relaxing folk of the final ballad "Don't Let Yourself Be Hurt this Time"), to build the same scenario of desolation. An awareness that is gleaned from the balance and the whole of things, where the individual episodes seem to search for and identify, within and among themselves, an incompleteness and an elusiveness that remain the primary source of the disorientation perceived by the listener and the indisputable charm of this refined and wild music, futuristic and primordial at the same time.  

This "Anyway, Your Children Will Deny It" is a jewel of rare intensity, a work that certainly deserves to be honorably present in the exclusive collection of music connoisseurs with finer tastes.