16 Oct 2019

Rockol review Julie's Haircut 'In Silence Electric'

Rockol review Julie's Haircut 'In Silence Electric':

They say (translated): 

"In The Silence Electric", the long night of Julie's Haircut 

Few dreams and many nightmares in the new album of the Emilian band, suspended between the shadows that regulate science and magic.
 


Silence, illusory, transformed into a long journey, electric and nocturnal. An expanded cosmos of fogs and reverberations that Julie's Haircut transfer to the metaphysical anxieties of "In The Silence Electric", the second album that the Sassuolo original band publishes for the English label Rocket Recordings, adding another couple of pieces to its mosaic composite of structures and alchemies.

A hypnotic progression that allows the ghosts that crowd the album to come out into the open in the esoteric fumes of "Emerald kiss" and then, still in the obstinate and nervous race of "Until the lights go out", between flashes of new wave, ambient and oscillations narcotics that come straight from the frantic avant-garde of Pink Floyd's "A Saucerful Of Secrets" as well as the obsessions of David Lynch and the soundtracks of John Carpenter and the Goblin. "Lord help me find the way", almost a heartfelt prayer to a luminous entity that can indicate a safe road, marks a saving moment of relaxation before turning once again into a black abyss in which nightmares and dreams take shape from the same material .

The new work takes up the tradition, by now consolidated, of the Emilian sextet of a free creative approach, but departs from it for a sequence of pieces with a more defined form, in their own way sought in a completely fluid manner. accompanies the different phases of the sleep of a night full of tension, the traces of the disk evoke a mysterious elsewhere of dark flashes, populating the darkness of all kinds of ultramundane forces, bearers of a darkness so enveloping as it is capable of sudden accelerations in which to dive almost unconsciously, before waking up again safely, Julie's Haircut beat the times of an aesthetic, cerebral environment , yet concrete. An interweaving of shadows, recalled right from the start with the sweetish dirge of "Anticipation of the night", which, in fact, offers the prelude to the dark that is about to arrive ready to swallow everything. A viscous flow able to manifest itself in the unresolved contrast between the whispered melody, the cascade of notes on the piano and the long dissonant drone of the electric guitar, the first glimpse of what the group itself defines “an incredible and versatile soundscape built through layers on instrumentation layers and a slow-burning voice. "

A hypnotic progression that allows the ghosts that crowd the album to come out into the open in the esoteric fumes of "Emerald kiss" and then, still in the obstinate and nervous race of "Until the lights go out", between flashes of new wave, ambient and oscillations narcotics that come straight from the frantic avant-garde of Pink Floyd's "A Saucerful Of Secrets" as well as the obsessions of David Lynch and the soundtracks of John Carpenter and the Goblin. "Lord help me find the way", almost a heartfelt prayer to a luminous entity that can indicate a safe road, marks a saving moment of relaxation before turning once again into a black abyss in which nightmares and dreams take shape from the same material.

Visions and contaminations of different genres, from post-rock to free jazz, that the Julies treat without interruption, making "In The Silence Electric" a disc with an arcane charm, pulsating with frantic - and threatening - drum patterns, guitars, keyboards, bass and sax, as well as hidden voices, often filtered, that seem to come from a far space, from the urgent cosmic flights of "Sorcerer" to the ghostly hermitage of "The return". The group, escaping from the classifications, returns in the dense atmospheres of the album that sense of exasperated impotence represented on the cover by the constrictive laces that gag the face of the German artist Annegret Soltau. Tones distant from the pop art of the poster "Libertad para Angela Davis" which twenty years ago showed itself triumphant in the graphic of the official debut "Fever In The Funk House". Today, that exuberant sound with the image of the curly African-American activist mythologized by the Cuban graphic designer Félix Beltrán seems to belong to a distant past, given the thousand trajectories that Julie's Haircut have crossed in their personal search without boundaries of sounds and suggestions, making themselves one of the more dynamic - and together long-lived - export band of our independent panorama.

Crossing the mirror of the dreamlike labyrinth, "In The Silence Electric", with its immersion in an unknown and dangerous world, seems to preserve a narrative articulated in a composite game of references with the fear, less immediate but concrete, of a reality now fatally exhausted. The primitive march of "Pharaoh's dream" and the final, bewitching, elegy of "For the seven lakes" thus follow a faint sigh, more and more distant until suddenly the silence returns, poised, once again, between the day and night. Between science and magic.


Read the original here: Rockol

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