Paul Roland
Danse Macabre

The macabre dance of a habitual opium smoker is a high-dose hallucinogenic journey into altered and disturbingly disturbed soundscapes, which can be found (if you prefer) among the alleys of a London of ripper, harlots, and gallows birds. And psychedelic abysses from a Victorian Horror Movie setting will open up to you, making you leave every hope behind as you plunge.

Paul Roland - whatever source you happen to consult, you will never find a single definition for this man. Singer-songwriter? Writer? Expert in esotericism and occultism? Paranormal researcher? Surely, one possessing an imagination that frightens, one with a mind to be thoroughly studied, perhaps starting from the monsters (in every sense) that this mind has spawned over the years. His art is a remote periphery of rock still unknown to most, something that to call "gothic rock" would be far too reductive. 

I’ll try with the words of others. Someone like Robyn Hitchcock (mind you) said that if Kate Bush had been born a man, she would have been born Paul Roland. A banal allusion? Both tied to occultism and magic, certainly. But there’s more. The two were born and raised a few kilometers apart, down in Kent, on the Channel, and perhaps the childhood home of Paul resembled the one where the very young princess sat at the piano and, key after key, shaped with painstaking passion a beauty revealed to the world in 1978. In 1978, however, Paul Roland was still a Mr. Nobody, except for (a few) insiders. Just a few singles for unknown London labels, with the reigning Punk and New Wave watched from a corner - unnoticed. Also because, just to complicate things, he loved to hide behind names like "Weird Strings" and "Midnight Rags", with a few anonymous collaborators giving life to his first LP - "The Werewolf Of London", 1980, for Ace, now a collectible relic. Then a silence of a few years, scattered singles and studio collaborations difficult to sort out, and work focused primarily on soundtracks. In 1985, the return. Which, in fact, is the beginning of the Roland that matters most.

Jostling in that neo-psychedelic underground with uncertain boundaries were very diverse characters, almost all sharing the elusive and enigmatic image representing them. The Hitchcockian Egyptians, that Nick Saloman behind the "The Bevis Frond" project, there were the floral and Beatlesque Dukes Of Stratosphear of Master Partridge, there was a Julian Cope who after the Explodes had already made some way. And apart, inside a dark room of which he was the solitary tenant, there was Paul. Who in 1987 writes, performs, and records (for Bam Caruso) this paranoid underground masterpiece of eighties art-rock. Even though it’s not all his doing, because you then scroll through the tracklist and meet, among others, a "Matilda Mother" almost at waltz time, whose appearance lights the bulb: yes, it’s the tribute to the Master from one of the most Barrett-esque of the decade, the classic cherry on a record of which it can be said "but, in the end, the originals were enough, there was no need for more". And yet the seal was needed, that necessary call to the piper from twenty years earlier, for these grooves to become unforgettable.

Turbid, visionary, morbid, enchanted by Walpole and Poe, struck by Lord Byron, obsessed with cemetery elegies. With the model of Roy Harper always present. The Roland of "Danse Macabre" is an alchemist capable of fusing together all the indispensable elements of the project, the sublime architect of a balance resembling a perfect card castle, always about to fall but wonderfully standing. It’s a folk for guitar and screeching organs, majestic keyboard openings and howls of acidic electric guitars; "progressive" in inspiration, decidedly DARK and New Wave in the results - VERY "Liverpoolian" the obsessiveness of certain moments, not coincidentally recalling Echo & The Bunnymen. Acid ballads, strange marches like "Madame Guillotine" (watch out, watch out for the lyrics - which would deserve a review of their own), the unusually velvety movements of "Still Falls The Snow" and that "Gabrielle" which is as close to a "Hit" (!!!) Roland has ever produced - marvelous organ solo. And between a balalaika and a cello, between stories of buccaneers and witch hunts, you will find yourself stumbling into almost six minutes of "In The Opium Den" - and here, over sounds from another world, the ghosts can manifest themselves in all their evidence - by the way, Roland has his theory on the existence of wandering spirits... on which he has written an entire book.

Barrettians, dark-wavers, psychedelomaniacs in general: here is a rare jewel for you.