Martha And The Muffins
This Is The Ice Age

There must be a reason if I remember perfectly the first time I listened to "Echo Beach." It was mid-June 1980. I’ll spare the other details, but it’s clear that the hit single from the first LP by Martha and the Muffins, from Toronto, Canada, is one of those tracks that somehow marked the history of "new rock" and that, once heard, were hard to forget, not only for the irresistible melody line but especially for the unique and unusual sound (the initial crescendo, the first guitar notes - was it maybe a flanger effect? I don’t know.) brrrrr...

The debut album, "Metro Music" was released in 1979, followed the next year by "Trance and Dance" and this "This is the Ice Age" of 1981, all on the Dindisc label.

In this third work, besides some changes in the band’s lineup, we notice the production by Daniel Lanois, who later became famous for producing several records by the unbearable U2.
According to many, the Canadians' best work, for others a turn towards classy pop but with commercial ambitions, it’s not hard to find titled opinions, comparisons, sound analyses... yes, but what is the feeling when listening to this record?

This is the Ice Age. This is the Ice Age.

The cover captures a blurred image of a poorly repaired wall while in the distance, clearly in the bright background, a skyscraper is portrayed; the same image is shown on the back cover but shot at sunset. Urban landscapes of chilling and haunting beauty, a scenario pulsating with live tension trapped in the immobility of the subjects and shapes. The content, the music of this album, captures the same contradiction made up of multiform compositions, rich in their own way with pathos and "lived experience", trapped in a cold executive vest: small songs of unusual beauty almost crystallized in a dry realization, with fragile but "definitive" architectures, I would say.

As should be the case for most musical works, the album must be evaluated as a whole, for purely illustrative purposes let's listen to the opening "Swimming" with guitar inserts that sound almost like Robert Fripp, which curiously contrast with the two-way singing and the sound of that kind of xylophone, or the leading single from the LP, "Women Around the World at Work", sold as a pop song, from which, however, the attentive listener can draw echoes of ordinary stories of metropolitan alienation; the refined new wave combined with the pathos transmitted by "Casualties of Glass."..
Perhaps we want to talk about the title track, where a fascinating, frozen, obsessive oriental-like progression meets the canons of new wave again, or the gem of simplicity that answers to the name "One Day in Paris", of rare and poignant beauty like the scent of certain clear and cold mornings?

The album reached our latitudes in early 1982. An entire universe was crumbling, to fall into the black hole of collective removal; a world moving away at increasing speed not only in time but in consciousness as well, not to be replaced, magically... by anything.
Thirty years later there’s even doubt that universe ever existed.
It is under these conditions that the hypothetical seasoned listener encountered records like this. We thought life would be a great thing, in the worst case we hoped for a purifying and liberating fire, but no, nothing of that kind.

Ordinary days followed one after another, movies, drinks, and pastries that did more damage than heroin and heroin that those who didn’t go to the movies took, rain-striped windows, the city’s heavy breath, and from time to time, a record to listen to on the turntable.

This is the Ice Age.