• Rating:
- If your level of frustration is at critical levels and you don't feel like putting up with a sea of nonsense, know that the group is cool and they've made a great album. Adieu!
- But if your level of frustration is still at critical levels but you truly have nothing-better-to-do and I've caught you with your fingers in your nose searching for new unexplored crevices, then brace yourself for this disgraceful rant.
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When you can't place a group precisely and struggle to fit them into a predefined genre, it's already something extremely positive as far as I'm concerned.
Now, even though I've never ventured beyond the barbed wire fence enclosing the junkyard of crushed cars that I rely on, in the ample (too much) time available
alone with myself, I've devised a personal ranking of the most attractive, not to say voluptuous, places on Earth.
Topping the list is Azerbaijan: with a name like that, it couldn't be otherwise.
Closely followed by the lush New Zealand: motherland of Kiwis, rich in vitamin C and healthy carriers of wholesome poop.
On the third step, for a series of reasons not entirely clear even to myself, is the extremely neutral Switzerland: homeland (among many other beautiful things) of the Young Divinities in question.
Regarding the new monolith forged by the Central European Trio, I wouldn't be able to say exactly what triggers such sonic attractiveness: perhaps the presence of high rates of healthy air or the unusual absence of maritime landings or maybe just the strict intellectual precision para-Germanic determining their meticulous and systematic operational disorder, but their layered sonic architectures have always had that extra something compared to many of their contemporaries, whether Europhilic or not.
For some, over time they have progressively become bourgeois, for others they have systematically progressed continually changing shape.
Clearly, the absolute truth, at least within my DeReview, is established by me: therefore I would decidedly lean towards the second thesis.
Opponents will be DeBanned by the end of the reading.
The deeper you go with the sonar in this new recording moloch, the more it consolidates (in me) the conviction that from their beginnings to today we have (always) dealt with an ensemble endowed with unmistakable expressive peculiarities.
Let's be clear: not all the albums championed throughout their long career can be said to be completely focused and successful, nevertheless, the strong personality that has characterized them has always been an unquestionable element.
At the dawn of this year, after several years of silence, at least in terms of recording, the three of them return with their usual dose of extremely clear ideas & sounds: changing skin once again while remaining themselves.
Here the tendency is to work the raw material more by jump and chisel: acting more meticulously, judiciously and underground, if you understand what I mean.
But the primal substance remains.
The foggy opening track ""Entre en matière" and the closure ""Everythem" are much more than explanatory in this regard.
Some echoes from the semi-buried, clanging and maximalist beginnings continue to be perceived under the radar: today they seem to be grafted into a substantially new sonic outfit.
It seems that their current need is no longer to hurl a boiling pot of proto-industrial magma at us as joyfully happened in the last millennium.
After all, when you're in your twenties or slightly older, it can make sense and it's rightly so: continuing endlessly to stir the same embers and forge the same bolts can become much less fun.
Especially for those who have the means to avoid it.
We are in the presence of a modern (not modernist) album in conception, sounds, and intrinsic structure.
Yet it might seem an old album by virtue of the fact that it's yet another evolutionary piece of a sharp and recognizable sound.
An organic electronics, alive, pulsing and shapeshifting characterized by the combination with more conventional instrumentation: all played in a not exactly conventional way.
The tracks develop like persistent concentric mantras that progressively thicken, elevating us beyond the chronosphere:
in this sense, I like to emphasize the explosive blows within the tribal totem ""All My Skin Standing" which brings to mind their most stinging and distant episodes.
But it's not mere self-referentialism or a sterile recycling of atmospheres already used: simply affirming once again "we're still us, and (we are) how we please".
As it always was and always will be.
For centuries of centuries, amen.
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