More Than Life
Love Let Me Go

Reviewing this album has become something complicated for me. Every time I started to type a few lines and then the block with the mouse arrow directed towards the x at the top right of the screen.
In the end, it makes sense; it's an album that cannot be deciphered from a technical standpoint, a personal album that, listened to at the wrong time and tied to a personal life story and a sad romantic ending, risks making you like it, but also crushing you terribly underneath. You lick your fingers as if it were Nutella on bread, but they are blood-red wounds.

Soundtracks don't just color warm vacation prizes resulting from some lucky coupon or prize contest. Otherwise, let's admit it, bands like More Than Life would never have had the need to write these things. As good Brits, they would have formed a brit-pop band suitable for any season of life.

The framing of “Love Let Me Go” is as difficult as putting together pieces of flesh and fragments of oneself after a bad collapse, as finding that lost self-esteem or starting over when you feel trembling because you feel the ground missing under your feet.

The base is certainly hardcore, but More Than Life is only interested in Swiss rhythms to a certain point. The song form is swallowed by an irrational and continuous centrifuge, whose motion updates moment by moment.
It’s not music for feverish ultras returning from a joyful bus trip, it’s music for solitary people, tired of living, with the only desire to start running towards nothing, screaming naked towards the closest river.

There is such emphasis, such fervor in James Matthews’s singing that it seems hard to believe his emotions aren’t real. It’s something moving and at the same time, difficult to describe in words. Rarely in hardcore have I felt such pathos as in “Scarlet Skyline” and the title track. And the tape rewinds three decades back to certain despair in some Rites Of Spring episodes.

A novel soaked in romantic decadence made of pages written with sweat and tears, whose epilogue depicts rainbows made of dozens of shades between gray and black.

It’s not easy to make choices, sometimes it’s probably easier to choose not to live, sometimes it’s better to say goodbye and move on because it’s important to see life from a different perspective that doesn’t include the other. Sometimes, in solitude and deafening silences, you can find the awareness and strength to write a new chapter in the story, made of unpredictable developments and new characters.
And no, love may not even be the most devastating experience, at least.

“Love Let Me Go” is not an album to overcome pain, it’s the cage made of pain, and its pages are only the iron of its impenetrable bars.