The Silencers
A Letter From St. Paul

After punk, there was freedom of creation-recreation, so the artists of the new wave tinkered with everything and each built in their own way. The New Wave grew physiologically, a dark and evocative period of transition between something that was and something else yet to come, like a womb during pregnancy... Then, once delivered, it deflated and soon became flat, "normal", disappeared.

Today's attempts, though well executed, to emulate its stylistic features have no real connection with new wave: they are almost a fashion, that of proposing the patterns and sounds of the music that was. And if the wave has its Interpol and its Editors, it cannot be said that other genres, even far older ones, do not have their clones... The new wave is such because it primarily concerns a historical period, and as such it was a "natural" phenomenon for music. Just as a birth cannot be compared to genetic cloning, the art of Ian Curtis and co-protagonists cannot and will never be confused with certain music that plays on the radio and TV today.

But if, for mother music, the pregnancy straddling the seventies and eighties was a painful yet splendid period, the life after those two pesky twins almost without conscience - synth-pop and new romantic - once they came into the world, was almost a nightmare!

In 1987, with Curtis long since buried and the Psychedelic Furs on their last legs, the Scotsman Jimme O'Neill and his compatriots choose to offer pure new wave, aiming to rediscover something more delicate and artistic than the half-dance of New Order, something Celtic-epic but less "paninaro" than Simple Minds, much more authentic than the New Romantic Movement.

It is better, therefore, to take refuge in the past, even if recent; better to get off this bandwagon called the Eighties. Better to blend into the cauldron of light music, than pretend to enjoy things you do not love. Better oblivion than being remembered as the protagonists of the neoromantic, simple fashion phenomena.

In 1987, The Silencers debuted with a lean and sensitive new wave record. Music with few muscles and good solutions, with ever-arpeggiated guitars, and never roaring. Music that does not have the robust, wrinkled, and dry physique of compatriots Waterboys, who had long since moved onto Irish folk. O'Neill's voice is perfectly Nordic, icy, chillier than "white meat"-Morrissey, but less cockney-snob than the vocalist of New Order... And so it is even in "I Can't Cry", a splendid sentimental drama offspring of "Angels Don't Cry" and "Ghost In You" by Bernard Butler and company, things that a Mediterranean singer would interpret as a Mario Merola new wave... Jimme, instead, just brushes against disinterest and abstraction. After all, if the song is titled "I Can't Cry"...

In several other tracks, the excellent "I See Red" first and foremost, it seems as if their noble delicacy wants to marry the paninaro-epic atmospheres of Jim Kerr, but it is not really so: the Silencers, at the end of the day, are Scottish, and they have those types of atmospheres inside them like all the other "fjord artists."

An excellent debut for a band that will take other paths, which while remaining true to itself will change its lineup, approach to composition, and style several times. A band that will never lose one thing: good taste. Even at the cost of oblivion.