"The World Is In Fear Again and It Has All Been Manufactured", apostrophizes the prelude.
Damn the preference for unusual and extravagant names. They got me with And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Please Inform the Captain this is a Hijack, The Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower, The Strange Death of Liberal England. And I keep falling for it.
The enticing name this time is Kiss the Anus of a Black Cat and it's from Belgium, as if I had never listened to Belgian music. But Stef Irritant, the sole owner of the moniker, doesn’t even know where indie lives. He drags behind the necromantic suggestions that the name inspires and bastardizes them with Tibetan reminiscences. However, he distances himself from the monotony of Current 93 and often embraces medieval influences, as much as one can mix the punk of Rudimentary Peni ("Beyond The Tanarian Hills") with medieval music.
A first part that warms the spirits ("The Firesky", "The Cranes Are Scared Of Sunworlds"), only to brake abruptly with "Salt", a ballad with the addition of piano, cello and, oxymoronically, more sugar than salt. The second part of the album, on the other hand, becomes more gothic and reflective.
What emerges is a bastard mix made of dark atmospheres, anguished chord cycles repeated ad infinitum, but also bucolic watercolors and songs with catchy choruses. The acoustic guitar is omnipresent, but that doesn’t exclude distortions accompanied by chimes and a way of singing that recalls a certain punk of times gone by.
Dark folk? Neofolk? Apocalyptic folk? Too many ingredients thrown into the pot to produce something homogeneous and defined. But whatever lesson Stef Irritant has learned, he has learned it well.
I write no more but I still dream.
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