Love Is Colder Than Death
Teignmouth

LA RECENSIONE

An ethereal, almost gloomy beginning, an organ suspended in a cold air. The atmosphere changes abruptly, shaken by a rhythmic beat. Electronic voices join the chorus and finally, a clear, pure, and solemn voice emerges.

Love Is Colder Than Death, by combining classical or archaising compositions, often with a pronounced gothic sense, with a skillfully measured electronic element, are the interpreters of a disrupted musical reconstruction, aimed at rediscovering its essence and balance.

The result of such an audacious purpose are surprising (improbable?!) pieces that blend without any respect (chronological? and not only) Gregorian chants and Baroque passages with dance rhythms or those close to industrial, transforming mystical impulses and cathedral-like airs into ultra-modern follies. The beautiful voice of Susan Heirich, accompanied by Maik Hartung and Sven Mertens, skilled multi-instrumentalists, attempts in this way to follow in the footsteps of Dead Can Dance, an unavoidable comparison for this trio.

It is undeniable that the Australian duo constitutes, with its ecstatic harmonic balances, the true starting point for the Swedish group, which, however, has the merit of having skillfully condensed the results achieved so far by the complex musical research not only of Dead Can Dance but of that entire wave of dark-wave that flirted with ambient and classical-medieval music, also recovering the lesson of dream-pop, without neglecting the seeds of industrial scattered throughout the eighties.

An interesting, curious, and somehow innovative characteristic of the group is their ability to "distort" the temporal relationships within their compositions. It is not a simple summation, following a mechanical scheme, of electronic arrangements to classical scores, nor can it be said that they merely insert medieval openings on modern beats. The styles and eras seem to compete with each other in the attempt to impose themselves as a reference, continually chasing and contaminating each other. A challenge that seems to have modernity as the winner, which dominates the final part of the album, after an initial predominance of the past.

New, but not original, Love Is Colder Than Death, manage in this album, Teignmouth (1991), to not appear just a bland concoction in which Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, Killing Joke, and company boil.
Unfortunately, they will not achieve the same result in their subsequent works, becoming increasingly pale synthetic imitations derived from the big names to which they refer.