Sophia
The Infinite Circle

A commonly employed expression in the criticism and history of Rock is that to verify if a song is "truly" a good song, it is necessary to strip it of its electric, symphonic, orchestral, electronic musical clothing and perform it in the most bare way possible, with acoustic guitar and voice.

"The Infinite Circle," second act of Sophia, seems to almost symbolically reiterate the concept from the initial notes, warning the listener with a sort of temporal "mind the gap" in relation to the (never too little mourned and never sufficiently remembered) past of the leader Robin Proper-Sheppard. The impression one derives from it actually needs to be deeper through successive listens: "The Infinite Circle" does not seem to intend, in the minds of its authors, to be the "new course of the" God Machine nor does it have the claim to encapsulate the "post-" God Machine sound; even though built around the form of the ballad and captured by chiaroscuro atmospheres, it reveals many more points in common with that seemingly interstellar distance from that experience made of fiery walls of sounds and rock declined in an industrial sense, which the impact of these delicate and slight ballads seems to underscore in terms of difference to the listener. More so and with greater self-awareness than its predecessor "Fixed Water," this album sharpens the poetic frame, lyricism and the emotional backdrop ("mood") of Proper-Sheppard's writing, which constitute its continuity trait, the element of the highest quality and symbolic and literary value, as well as musical, perhaps being the loss of emotional intensity its most fragile side, the probable price to pay for greater cohesion and conceptual integrity.

As always, the songs of Sophia focus on the "love-lost love" pairing, which is clearly evident from "If Only", "I’d Rather", "Woman", "Within Without", all characterized by the attack with Robin's classical guitar, a lower, intimate voice, no longer like Perry Farrell, and the subsequent orchestral opening, which is partly missing in "Sometimes", slightly distorted voice, and jarring with the intimacy of the acoustic guitars; the two episodes that break this homogeneous pattern are the opener "Directionless" ("I say goodbye to my best friends"), a sort of intimate farewell, escape as an ideal gateway from/into the internal confusion, and "Every Day", a bright finely crafted pop gem, which captures the distant echo of the more subdued and melancholic Oasis ("The Masterplan", "Wonderwall"). Even if apparently the almost-enclosure "The River Song" traversed by noise-core riffs and "Electrical Storm[ed]" seems to detach from the rest of the album, the piece once again underlies an even though angry invocation of internal pacification and protection from wounds that Proper-Sheppard cannot hide deep down ("I go to the river, to find someone, someone who protects me from where I began"), places of suffering as well as suffering of places, an intimate bare display of one's soul as an internal geography; Jeff Towsin's drumming, ex-Swervedriver (another shoegaze movement band), after all, is absolutely identical to that of Ron Austin, with breaks, stop and go, countertempo, suspensions, to delineate a rhythmic profile that tends to the infinite, a suspension of the narrative-musical time, the harmonic openings of strings, and piano touches do the rest; scrutinizing beneath the metal-hyper-conceptual surface of "...Second Storey," we find at the core songs steeped in lyrical and at times desperate sadness, at times illuminated by the same sunshine after the storm, if in those two albums there were "Boy By The Roadside", "The Life Song", "It’s All Over", "Purity", in the two Sophia albums we find "Bastards" with its circular and infinite melody, increasingly wide and "far away", the aforementioned "Woman", and "So Slow"... never read the titles too literally, the slowness of the title may not be just a reference to the refrain, as the infinite circle of the title is a powerfully symbolic image, the narrator declaring the initial ("I’m losing My Direction…") and final ("I’m going to the river to find someone, someone who protects me when, the night has come") disorientation is also aware that as much as this existential pathway is circular and infinite, it's indeed obliged.

Ultimately, it’s a reassuring title. There can be many terms of comparison, from the solemn madrigals of Echo and the Bunnymen to the luminous freshness of the best Verve, with perhaps the Radiohead of the "Ok Computer" period being the midpoint of greatest synthesis and poetic affinity, for those who follow Robin Proper-Sheppard, and not without difficulty, will want to continue doing so.

By ’πνοςphere boy ©

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