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Rating: Perhaps it is only when you are sweating profusely, feeling the adipose tissue just beneath the skin turn to liquid, worn out from working on the flanks of the sirocco, and you gaze out the window searching with your eyes for some greenery but find only dryness and barrenness, that you can truly delve into the heart of this album. An album that can certainly warm even the rainiest and most extended (or ravaged?) winter with so much melancholy that tends to gradually lull itself to sleep and fade like the finest memories. Those you later no longer remember, turning into sensations of lived experiences. The best thing for me.
If there are any locals from Matera familiar with this album, try imagining dressing in winter clothes of black and listening to its tracks at 2:30 PM on any August afternoon in the lowest point of the stones: souls and spirits evoked by traditional tales would emerge, translucent, from the doors of houses for a fire dance intended for those tourists who want to see. Not the stones themselves nor anything else, but the aura that, immanent, envelops landscapes untainted and, for this reason, challenging to truly comprehend.
England historically offers such situations, of bands that begin their activity under the skin of more or less large cities, in underground venues, in front of a few smoked and drunk people starting to believe and hammer away. The viral process begins, today supported by social media, and here amongst many promises, some even good but cynically left out from the fate à la roulette russe, emerges the one that becomes a mass phenomenon. And this band emerged from the arena of hopeful Albion musicians by popular acclaim. Fame preceded them. The crowd of admirers they had before this full debut, thanks to the weight (maximum or light, depending on the perspective), of an EP that enchanted me like few other musical productions in the calends of my life.
They made us wait for two years, I yearned for the moment of its release. Or rather, I would say many of us truly suffered. And now that it is out, who knows, I haven’t heard or read much. An incongruence and a disproportion of mediatical twists and turns that I don’t understand. Perhaps we all stood speechless with the digital support's headphone stuck in our ear bleeding, with the disc inserted in a CD player that has stopped playing but doesn’t give you anything back anymore, with the vinyl needle that continues to spark and create warmth. A surreal warmth. A warmth that makes me think of liquids. And liquids, in general, make me think of coolness. I didn’t want to say it but here I do: magma.
Shoegaze and psychedelia get along but must not be confused. Or rather, some musicians better do because they manage to prepare perfect cocktails of the two pure fuels, flambéed down to be dreamt about with open eyes and an unusable stomach. I remember certain periods when I weighed nothing. Other bands, however, burn out during the preparation and fail. Others yet are misunderstood by ignorant ears. They do psychedelic rock, and they say it’s shoegaze, they do shoegaze and say it's psychedelic rock. The right measure, the balance in proportions, in my opinion, has been achieved by few. And today only by Koolaid Electric Company, standard-bearers of a malaise that tries, however, to remedy the absence of light, ingeniously crafting a scorching and viscous fluid, slightly luminescent. It’s a bit like when you have spasms, or don't know if you’ve ever had a fever so high that you delirium.
It’s hot, I sweat, I have lucid moments and others less so, in which I write these few scattered notes on a record that might become my favorite of the year. I'm still pondering it. Meanwhile, listen to it. And get some sunshine because winter is long.
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