Niagara
Hyperocean

LA RECENSIONE

It isn't easy to record an album.

Not everyone can do it, not everyone is granted this privilege. It's not something you can decide, plan, or dedicate to in your spare time. You can try, of course, and for a while, you can even believe it, but in the end, it's inevitable: you'll realize that creating music is not simple.

This is what Niagara does. They shape an artistic product that completely disregards any market schemes and aims straight for finding a specific identity. The only essential element every band should aspire to nowadays.

It's the most difficult task, in a sense, to give incisiveness to one's work. To obsessively recreate sounds, movements, where every song needs to converge. Climaxes and emotional breaths.

It all started almost as a joke with Otto (Monotreme Records, 2013), a beautiful album, which still carried the reminiscences of previous projects and countless musical influences; inevitably.

With the third album, the Turin duo (a trio in live performances, with the addition of Paolo Scapazzoni on drums) reaches full awareness of their means. They know where they want to go, which direction to take their music, and most importantly, they know how to achieve it.

The rhythms are absolutely crazy and sometimes drastically change halfway through the song (listen to “Roger Water” to get an idea). The vocals are polished to the highest level, even more so than in previous albums.

The recurring theme is clearly water, that of an imaginary planet recreated in 3D by Cy Tone for the video of the title track. And some sounds were directly recorded and sampled in an aquatic environment, thanks to the use of special underwater equipment.

“Firefly” is a timeless journey, an analog synthesizer to explore the darkness near the gates of Tannhäuser. “Solar Valley” seems like a jammed engine slowly starting to gear up, taking away every star and planet in the Universe like an endless black hole. Together with “Twin Horizon” and “Alfa 11,” it forms a chilling album closure.

One of the few electronic groups that still perform live on stage, in the era of “let's do a DJ set to save time and money.”

I see Niagara as the most innovative band we currently have in Italy, a cultural asset to export and I wonder, why is there no longer a curiosity to listen to something new? Why are there so few of us left? Me writing, you reading, what has happened?

Not an album for everyone, but for those who manage to be captivated, the journey will be unforgettable.