7D Media 2016
The News
Penumbral messages out of noosphere: Turin trio take it to the limit and stress-test the media madness with Crimsonites in tow.
Seven year down the line from “Down In Shadows” which signaled their advent, this Italian band venture into a lighter, or rather gray, area on its follow-up. The descending clouds on the album’s cover may signify informational mist but it’s way too serious for the irony concentrated inside, although the music intensity can sometimes fog the obvious. That’s how it goes for “Groundhog Day” as loops lasso Walt F. Nyx’s guitars and Danilo A. Pannico’s drums before vocals make sense of the infectious assault and propel the tempo-shifting riffs towards melodic entropy, while “Oscillations Du Chaos – Part III” displays a slow-burning slide into disorder.
Yes, hectic progression feels very logical here, running from the reflection of morning anxiety in “Restless Slumber (At The Break Of Dawn)” whose serene piano is urged by bass rumble to get vigorously groovy, with jazzy vignettes tightened up on a dancefloor killing fields, to epic “The Daily Dark Delirium” where angry vespertine spirits stray into the vortex of Trey Gunn’s strings and soundscapes. His former colleague Adrian Belew’s smirk and fretwork adorn the adventurous bounce of “A Sarcastic Portrait (Editorial, Home And Foreign…)” which is quite heavy – just as city ambiance is, musique concrète et all – but not without occasional blissful respite, one spilling into “Discord (Domestic Policies)” for an acoustic strum to add harmonic sensuality to the coldness of the day. Still, it’s “The Paper (Titles & Subtitles)” that, having parted with fervency, accumulates the oppression of press and makes a funeral march out of it.
Such is our reality – shaped by media, yet leaving the interpretation of the news to a regular person, and though insanity is never far away, irony is a safe refuge, especially when music is there. This is the gospel of N.y.X.
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