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When I first listened to "Wish I Could Dream It Again", I was stunned to learn about this band's Italian nationality: it's 1994, Litfiba is bringing "Spirito" to life, and a year later Timoria will gift us the excellent "2020 Speedball".
Well, even in Italy, the icy wind of Scandinavian countries influenced the inspired minds of two brothers of Sicilian origin, Carmelo and Giuseppe Orlando. And that's why it would be limiting to classify the genre of this album, an interweaving of Burzum-like atmospheres (in fact, in one of the booklet's images Carmelo is wearing the T-shirt of "Hvis Lyset Tar Oss"), softened by the Mediterranean taste of classical guitars. This is the atmosphere of "Wish I Could Dream It Again", a journey into the melancholic yet simultaneously angry world of Carmelo Orlando, voice and guitar and author of almost all the album's lyrics.
And it is precisely the vocal line adopted by Carmelo that attracts the listener's attention: a powerful scream alternating with clean parts that sometimes go beyond the limit of tuning. Many criticized Carmelo's clean singing, still inexperienced in front of the microphone, although I believe that in the context of this album, those off-pitches are part of the best of the entire project's architecture.
Tracks like "Sirens in Filth" and "Swim Seagull In The Sky" will remain as some of the best of Novembre's production: the scream is obsessive, and the riffs of pure black staple hold well the rhythmic section of a very young Giuseppe Orlando. And the work of the latter deserves praise: by listening to "Let Me Hate" you will appreciate his immense qualities, perhaps hindered by sufficient production, although two years later with "Arte Novecento", the younger brother of the Catanese combo will be able to give free rein to his technical skill.
I was telling you about magical, dreamlike, Mediterranean atmospheres, the result of a very successful interlock between classical arpeggios inspired by Fabrizio De André (Carmelo is still a great enthusiast of our late poet) and the aforementioned black bursts. "Behind My Window/My Seas of South" and "Nostalgia/Its Gaze" will make you sink into these worlds.
Notable is also the presence of a couple of solos (a secular component of this genre) in the track "Swim Seagull In The Sky" (as you can see, I really love this piece).
A bit for the not excellent production, a bit for commercial ideas, in 2002, Novembre decided to re-record "Wish I Could Dream It Again", changing its title to "Dreams D'azur": it is a more mature revisitation, accompanied by a markedly better production, in which the vocal parts are replaced (with sometimes excessive overdubs) by a Carmelo now mastering his voice.
In my view, all this was unnecessary, "Wish I Could Dream It Again" remains a very valid debut album, considering that in 1994 the Italian scene was quite far from this genre.
Tracklist and Lyrics
04 Let Me Hate (03:04)
Let me hate
As black prevails
As blood invades
As love congeals
Let me hate
05 Sirens in Filth (05:50)
Bitterness blows in the heart
Like chilly draughts in the hall
Of a crystal castle
Lost among clouds made of gold
Those anxieting visions
Images behind frozen windows
Make my eyes bleed
Ebony blood
When the silvergray fluid shall crack reality's walls
Mixing with blood and filth as sirens swimming in pitch
When the sweet arcades of these desperate our owns
Trickle down upon yhe misery of this dead everyday life
Like pitch on your wings
Like a child lost in a war
Like dark paint upon a shiny picture
Like dirty sperm on a toy
And whwn the new star will shine of its own black
And there will be nowhere to shelter
Maybe they'll understand who we are
What we'll always cry for
06 Swim Seagull in the Sky (07:39)
[SOLO - Carmelo]
Speechless
Unreal
Drowning in an abyssal silence
Slowly moving through this immensity
I fly, swimming in this darkblue sky
It's cold, I'm scared and besides rust
Even ice covers these doors
[SOLO - Antonio]
God knows hoe I'd be awake now
God knows how my eyes would tear now
God knows how I wouldn't lose my way
God knows how scared I am
How the seagull would pass away:
[SOLO - Carmelo]
Swim seagull in the sky
[SOLO - Fabio]
07 The Music (03:59)
Incomprehensible like life
Unexplainable like infinity
My Lord, my God
An abstract entity the music is
Inconceivable like life
Immeasurable like infinity
My God, my Lord
It witnessed our beginning so the music is
Annihilating, upsetting
Mirror of joys and sorrows
It lives outside reality's walls
And we are it'd door to our dimension
It comes through our emotions
It runs through our art
And come out from our veins
From our pains
And so we use it right to annihilate
And so we use it to upset
Coming out from our pains
From our veins
12 Neanderthal Sands (03:43)
[SOLO - Carmelo]
Caught in the whirls of time
Cold winds bring me to timeless shores
Shattering, flowing down grain by grain
By the sandglasses of the past
An innate memory
An anxieting deja-vu
The unconscious awareness
Of the error we are
The unconscious awareness
Of the exception we are in the universe
[SOLO - Carmelo, Antonio]
We are alone
13 Christal (02:00)
Once she told me about a dog
Which abandoned by its owner
It died of melancholy
Since the it was all a little bit clearer
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