Planningtorock
Have It All

The etiquette of reviews often compels us to stick to the technical aspects of an album, its purely discographic composition (track numbers and titles, genre, instruments), never dwelling too much on the emotions that a work can evoke. I spoke about this in my brief and comforting delirium caused by that little-known ecstasy of Bjork in full lightness, titled "Prayer Of The Heart," wildy relegated to the De-Cases for its perhaps too "outsider" component. But how can one be cold, technical, or academic in the face of certain works that ravage the soul and steal the heart? There are musical works where each individual sound no longer makes sense, but the composition of the beats, the voice that is not voice, but air. The soul filtered through an ensemble of instruments. Nothing makes sense anymore, except for the strength. And it's the miracle of music, to sound perfectly harmonic and to create, swirling in the air, mysterious and intangible edens.

And then there are records that don't even make you imagine they are such. They are real sound worlds, sketched out ad hoc to be otherworldly deities. And so emerges Planningtorock, a woman who manages to be avant-garde even when everything seems already experimented in the avant-garde field. She emerges amidst the crepuscular ice of an iridescent work like "Tomorrow In A Year" from Knife-memory, and when she's not ravaging other people's pieces in pure, splendid visceral sunsets, she applies her intrinsic eros/thanatos composition to pieces - frankly speaking - stunning. 

Disorienting electronics, small whirlpools of lights, cuts of shadows, strings as a threat, voice often filtered by despair and euphoria. And there she is, with a debut album like "Have It All" (followed by an equally splendid "W" this year) and with a track, chosen as a single, which drags you with force and violence into the most terrifying of limbos: it's "Changes." A song that fits perfectly among the most brilliant and unsettling of the past decade. Echoes of Kate Bush, a rhythm punctuated by omnipresent strings, whirlpools of pure and delirious descents into the abyss. Down. Sink. Emerge. Sink. Desperately. In search of an increasingly blurred and distant light. They are barely 4 minutes, but they encapsulate the soul of an entire album. 

And the rest? Speaking of it in scientific and neorealist terms would be the most complete uselessness. A frozen lake in music, a sudden explosion of incandescent magma, an avalanche of snow with fatal consequences.

Yes, the progression of 21st-century blues of an aggressive "I Wanna Bite Ya" or the pure, explosive choral moments between the celestial and the infernal of an experimental rock piece like the marvelous "Local Foreigner" do not need introductions. But neither do they require the title track, the pure and raw anti-dance song, which paradoxically manages to make you dance, or the extraordinary "Think That Thought," which echoes the structure of "Changes" with strings-voice-beats, becoming a blood-red rose with a jazzy flavor.

No. Talking about it even now has been, frankly, useless. Talking about it this way even makes me seem partisan. But it is impossible not to love albums that, like this, have you travel on autopilot. To touch the Norwegian fjords or Mount Fuji, passing through the labyrinths of one's own, relentless soul.

Yes, listening to certain albums means, a little, rediscovering oneself.