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Rating: Prisoner
It has just passed 8 PM on Wednesday, April 11, 2007, and I'm still imprisoned by this music, happy to be so. Since I started listening to it, night fell suddenly, and I surrendered to a cloud of sounds floating between electronics, rock, blues, country, soul, and gospel. Indefinite, vaporous images, seemingly contrasting, that blend together, condensing emotion alongside shards of sensitivity that never fully explode, linear. Lost in these atmospheres, I now wonder how it came to be. How did this album manage to conquer my musical fickleness, my innate tendency to get bored continuously?
The answer can only correspond to one name: Mark Lanegan. Yes, it’s his fault, with his hoarse, shadowy, luciferous, seductive and unsettling voice, present in eight songs of this second album by the English Soulsavers (Rich Machin and Ian Glover). A dark, somber, warm, dreamy, enveloping, beautiful work, where every song is a certainty. It keeps what it promises from the beginning, never betrays. That's why when the music starts, among an electronic hiss, a rusty guitar, a gospel choir, and the voice, you already know how the road will proceed. All that remains is to travel it, and everyone can do it in their own way.
So when "Paper Money" comes on, I turn up the volume to feel the pleasure of musical energy through the vibrations of the basses directly in the stomach. When "Spiritual" by Josh Haden starts, I need to close my eyes and meditate to savor every subtle nuance of the deep, tormented, and bitter singing, capable of conveying a comforting sense of intimacy. In front of "Ghost Of You And Me", the imagination first shatters then takes flight, releasing thoughts one after another, inescapably, illogically, in search of a glimmer of light. Instead, diving into the dense and profound arrangements of the instrumental "Arizona Bay" is like slowly falling into an inner abyss.
Rough and visceral, deceitful and hypnotic, every passage of this album provides an almost subliminal pleasure, tightening its noose from which it’s hard to break free. When then, from the liquid darkness, from the fog, from the rain, and the ghosts beside Lanegan, the ethereal delicacy of Will Oldham's voice materializes ("Through My Sails" by Neil Young) then it's truly over because I know I won't be able to stop listening, captivated by another bewitching bar of this prison.
I will free myself sooner or later, other albums, other sounds, other emotions will come, but I believe I will not forget the isolation of this captivity, which, a few minutes past 9 PM on Wednesday, April 11, 2007, has not yet ended...
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