I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness
Fear Is On Our Side

I am a man of few words, shy, introverted, distant. I was born in the seventies, and since I am the right age, I can even afford to be an asshole. I'm an asshole because our generation grew up during the full dark/new wave era, we listened to the best music of the last thirty years, and today we know more than the others. At 17, I used to ride the subway dressed in black with headphones in my ears, and my soundtrack was Pornography, Three Imaginary Boys, Seventeen Seconds, Bauhaus, and so on. And even though today I try to pretend to be like everyone else, the truth is that inside me, that demon is still there.
Imagine then my surprise (mixed with skepticism) when I randomly learned that a group from Austin, Texas, American!, had ventured to resurrect the Dark! In 2006! We thought, he and I, that it was a ridiculous utopia, the usual glossy revival operation for senile nostalgics.
Then I saw the cover and something changed, a black background with a blue heart on it and an inverted cross on the blue heart. Dark, desperate, and minimalist... I fell into the trap.
And it was a revelation. The triumphant renaissance of Dark is fulfilled today at the beginning of 2006. An assassin album, dark, desperate, twisted, violent, and cold at the same time, a blade in the heart, a bullet in the stomach. Suddenly, I find myself in 1987, and the nightmares of those days resurface: Joy Division, Psychedelic Furs, New Order, and, of course, the Cure of Pornography and Bauhaus of In The Flat Field, all together and all as if I were hearing them for the first time. It's a difficult, complicated record that flows incredibly compactly and homogeneously in familiar but surprisingly new territories. It all sounds like back then, but it's perfect even in this April of 2006.

12 love songs on the edge of the abyss, 12 desperate love songs, twisted upon themselves, shattered, devastated. The choice is clear already in the name, "I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness", a sincerely improbable name for a band but ever so paradigmatic of what awaits you. The title speaks volumes. The sound is sparse and minimalist, few instruments and few frills, the bass is crooked and fills the speakers, makes them swell, the semi-electronic eighties drums go straight with cold lashes but it’s hypnotic, obsessive, and inescapable. 12 tracks that tear the soul from your body.

The beginning is thrilling, "The Ghost" has a martial, fast, and pressing pace, on which lies an obsessive and shrill arpeggio, but suddenly it explodes powerful and wicked. The next "According To The Plan", already featured on a 2003 EP is reintroduced here in a new, clean, and stunning version in which a goosebump-inducing distorted bass triumphs and a chorus, one of the few on the record, leaves you speechless. The album continues like this until the end, giving you no respite, without mercy, alternating poignant and still moments with real electric waves of anger. Finally, the apotheosis, the perfect sequence, "Long Walk" an incredible slow and hypnotic ballad, "Fear Is On Our Side" perhaps one of the most beautiful songs of the last ten years and then, after the untitled two-minute track that lets you catch your breath, the grand finale with "If It Was Me" a sparkling and bleeding dark ride where the whole album and possibly all the dark of today and yesterday reside.

Sublime nourishment for dark souls like mine, for those who looked at the world from another point of view, this album awakens things I had put aside while growing up. I see that boy dressed in black with an angry look and headphones in his ears and I realize that boy is still here, still alive, damn if he's alive.