Rome
A Passage to Rhodesia

Hymns for the Defeated.

“Flowers from Exile” and “Nos Chants Perdus” were respectively the “Spanish” album and the “French” album by Rome. If the triple “Die Aesthetik der Herrschafts-freiheit”, in its grandeur, was the “World-Album”, and “Hell Money”, with its relentless struggle against Capital, could be seen as the “American” one, “A Passage to Rhodesia” is undoubtedly the “African” album of Jerome Reuter.

“To live in Africa you must know what it is to die in Africa”
(E. Hemingway)

With Rome, we return to rubbing salt in the wounds: yet another bloodstained page of recent history, one of the murkiest and most unknown, forgotten, is the subject of investigation by the tireless Luxembourg musician. Rhodesia: the former British colony that in 1965 sought to become independent, an attempt that sparked the brutal escalation of violence and death in a bloody civil war that pitted the Rhodesian Front (the white rebels, who intended to establish a state based on apartheid and were therefore opposed by Western forces) against the faction of guerrillas backed by the USSR and led by the fierce Robert Mugabe (the future dictator of Zimbabwe, the state to be proclaimed at the end of the clashes).

Hymns for the Defeated. With lucid detachment, Jerome Reuter narrates the events, taking now one position, now the other, reconstructing the events not with the rigor of a reporter, but through the tearful eyes of a poet: describing, interpreting sensations, fighting the hypocrisy of the great powers and siding with humanity, with the shattered humanity of men who fought for an idea, for an ideal, for a cause doomed to tragic defeat: this is the theme that has always fueled Reuter’s painful explorations of history.

His latest work (released in 2014 in a box at prohibitive costs for anyone—a genuine commercial suicide—and finally, in 2015, issued also in an edition affordable for ordinary people) looks back into Rome's discography, landing precisely around those albums we mentioned at the beginning: those “Flowers from Exile” and “Nos Chants Perdus” which, with this “A Passage to Rhodesia,” form sort of a hypothetical trilogy. Works, the first two, that highlighted a significant shift in Rome's career towards the shores of singer-songwriter tout-court. If with the subsequent episodes, also due to the separation from producer Patrick Damiani, they returned to a more direct, essential, and more apocalyptic sound if you will, the ever-lonely Reuter today looks back at the haunting ballads of his “middle phase,” hitting the mark completely.

Perhaps it's because I hadn't listened to anything from Rome in three years (an eternity for an artist who had accustomed us to dense annual releases), but I ended up appreciating this latest work immensely, perhaps more than the others. After years, I perceive something artificial in Reuter’s flair: after nine albums, after all, he certainly doesn't lack skill and craft, but perhaps it is the excessive emphasis he places on every single note and word that makes it all over the top, as if the communicative urgency is driven from below by an artillery too heavy to go unnoticed. But if Reuter lacks the sensitivity of a refined singer-songwriter, he compensates with the strength and impact of a visionary storyteller, that rare quality that today makes him undoubtedly the greatest and most mature interpreter of apocalyptic folk, without, moreover, keeping its uncomfortable fetishes.

Now a mature artist with a defined personality, Reuter handles his artistic material with great ease, not trying to be the author, the Leonard Cohen, at all costs, but giving in unreservedly to what he does best: a powerful apocalyptic folk that looks, with great stylistic independence (so much so that today his sound is recognizable among thousands), at Douglas Pearce of “But, What Ends When the Symbols Shatter?” and “Rose Clouds of Holocaust.” A masterpiece that draws from other masterpieces, therefore, but with great personality and class: if it is the acoustic guitar, as always, called to support Reuter’s tormented crooning, it is in the meticulously crafted arrangements, in the keyboards filled with apocalypse, in the martial solemnity of the percussion, in the sampled voices from the darkest recesses of history, that we find the winning characteristics of Rome’s latest bloody discographic birth. An album of paradoxes: in it, the warmth and lush nature of Southern Africa is overshadowed by the specter of Old Europe; in it, typical Central European moods of the genre merge with exotic settings that recall the literature of authors like Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad.

“Electrocuting an Elephant” (but, how beautiful are the titles of Rome!): a “detuned orchestra” is the invocation, the rite aimed at regressing back in time toward an oblivion that promises nothing good. The clear baritone voice of Reuter bursts in “The Ballad of the Red Flame Lily,” vaguely pop in its stride, as Rome had not been for some albums now. Among intimate, epic ballads and impactful ambient interludes, the music of Rome, despite the themes addressed, rarely becomes overbearing. The impetus, the lyrical drive, in “A Passage to Rhodesia,” are constantly restrained by a narrative pathos that imposes rigor and austerity: a restrained emotionality, as if the words struggled to escape from a throat broken by tears. The magic word “Rhodesia” (as if to continually reaffirm the concept, but also probably with the intent to generate a mantra that digs deep under the listener’s skin) recurs often in the lyrics, dotted with quotes from Hemingway, Sartre, Eliot, Orwell, etc.

The powerful ballad “One Fire” (which wouldn’t look out of place, with its boldness, on an album by Cult of Youth), the tragic and solemn “A Farewell to Europe” (with its creeping choirs and imposing percussion), the stern “Hate Us and See if We Mind” (Death in June down to the core!) and the poignant “In a Wilderness of Spite” (with that woman's voice launched in the finale in a crescendo of Morriconian intensity) are, in my view, the most thrilling episodes of this album which, indeed, shows no signs of yielding in its articulation, never letting its guard down, never easing the tension. Until the concluding, moving (with fatalistic tones and not devoid of that relaxing thrust that often pervades closing tracks in Rome's albums) “Bread and Wine”; until the ironic epilogue-farce built on sixties-song atmospheres of “The Past is Another Country”: never was an outro more painful.

“Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the shadows”
(T.S. Eliot)

Hymns for the Defeated. Hymns for all of us.