Maudlin Of The Well
Leaving Your Body Map

THE REVIEW

“Maudlin Of The Well have the ability to put something in their music that you will never find anywhere else: the grotesque”
From “Encyclopedia of Bands with Strange Names” by Fulvio Romiti.

“Maudlin Of The Well paint their sonic universe with the distorted colors of a world soft as a Dalí watch”
From “Painting and music, a often lethal combination” by Fulvio Romiti.

“Maudlin Of The Well compose acid fairy tales and comic tragedies, terrifying love stories, and entertaining horrors of the human being”
From “Combine adjectives with words of opposite meaning” by Fulvio Romiti.

Well, after this terrible introduction that is at least cloying even to me while I should be here rolling with laughter, we can introduce the only Maudlin not yet reviewed on DeBaser.
Kidding aside and the biases of the review's start, the object, the simulacrum that could best represent this album and more generally the music of this American ensemble is a plaster gnome (a fair tribute to our little gnomes). The plaster gnome is ultimately useless. But its very existence can only convey a sense of disorientation, it is terribly grotesque to have a plaster gnome, have you ever thought of that? I imagine so. It looks at us slyly from the low of its height, often smiles, why should it smile? Maybe it knows some mystery of which we foolish humans can only grasp the outlines without being able to define it (BUM).

The same goes for Maudlin Of The Well and especially for this Leaving Your Body Map where the grotesque reigns. First of all, the voluntarily ridiculous brutal-death parts of the twin Bath almost entirely disappear. The first track Stones Of October’s Sobbing opens similarly to the delayy The Blue Ghost/Shedding Qliphot of Bath, also the first track of the respective CD, a good sign. After about a minute and a half, however, a delirious doom phrasing begins, (clean) guitars extremely heavy, slow, cumbersome as a herd of elephants, all accompanied by a delirious trumpet that after less than a minute accompanies a new evolution, it should be an extremely sad song yet the melodies are sunny and cheerful, as if it were black metal in a major key (ndw it is not black metal relax).
This is where the grotesque, the mystery lies, a landscape could be a sunny summer day where the sun beats on a stream of still and muddy water or above a fresh concrete flow. It is followed closely by Gleam In Ranks perhaps the least sick episode of the whole album but equally wonderful. Then comes the nearly 10 minutes of Bizzare Flowers/A Violent Mist, intro complete with bells, soft delicate voice, measured with a spoon, true relaxation only to explode into the joyously gloomy chaos of the rest of the track to delight us with a beautiful very fusion-like ending. The fourth track, on the other hand, is a wonderful 4-minute acoustic interlude with guitars that waste in natural harmonics and some bongos that make their appearance towards the end along with the violin and wind section (the entry of the clarinet is orgasmic) of MOW. The fifth The Curve That to An Angle Turn'd is surely the romantic one despite the initial appearances of the entire maudlin plot. The sixth and my favorite Sleep Is A Curse is a beautiful melancholic ballad, but as always sadness is forced to pass through particularly melodic and sunny keys (=open tunings, as clear as the sun), with only acoustic guitar and voice.
I finish the track-by-track description with the monstrous Riseth He The Numberless part 1 the most death-like of the whole record where the same continuous up-and-down of the wonderful Ferocious Weights from the debut album My Fruit...bla bla bla reappears more or less.
The rest of the album is insanely sunny like the previous songs so I avoid continuing.

In some interviews, MOW have stated that they wanted to do something that no one had ever tried to do. I would say that for another twenty years a similar triad of records will be impossible to see, let's enjoy it now that we can.
Opium/hallucinogens combined with true artistic genius 3-Music 0.