Artist: M!R!M
Title: Enjoy Your Sorrow
Genre: Post-Punk
Release date: 14th October 2011
Label: AF Music
Album Review
Winter and Italy are two things which didn’t want to match perfectly, as well as rough, dashing post-punk and Mediterranean latitudinal lines… (I should know, that this is a prejudice, but Hey, it’s a unconscious association!)… but I’m a learner and I see, that all this can fit together in the most perfect way!
Because M!R!M (their internet address reveals that these letters could stand for “My Rockin Mother”!) were founded in winter 2010 in the lovely landscape of the Tuscany and their music is that kind of genuine and unvarnished, deeply ingrained in the origins of the Post-Punk / Goth genesis, what you normally would expect a few more borders northwards… and some decades ago. That’s surely grounded on the indicated influences of the band, which list names like The Cure (if you erase everything after 1982!), The Fall, Gang Of Four and other British Wave / Punk / Avant-garde icons, on whose musical breeding ground the Italian duo has managed to plant a very cragged, noisy and energetic seedling, called ‘Enjoy Your Sorrow’.
It’s the titles nihilistic order (or is irony?), that coils throughout the whole five track piece, that starts with ‘Me You And Nobody Else’, a track, that didn’t raise any doubt about the direction we will move the next minutes. Like a choir of distorted devils screaming and gnawing guitars are crawling in for making your veins vibrate, accompanied by a straight pulling drum pattern, that implicates a feeling of being on the run (or maybe on the prowl?), restless but with a certain aim. Circling bass lines and charming guitar hooks introduce the vocals, which seem to flash up from a space between, bearing the syllables and words like bolts of lighting with no palpable source.
Confused by an end in sudden bursts, you are caught by your shoulders for being thrown in the next song, called ‘Manila’, that keeps you ducked in distorted guitars, pumping beats and fast-paced vocal lines, that always seem to push you in a determined tendency, regardless of your own volition. ‘I don’t know what I was waiting for’ starts with a vinyl-like scraping (a time-related reminiscence?) before another great six-string hook line launches flashbacks of a time, when this kind of musical genre started to recover it’s own shape and language, free from appropriation and boundary. It’s not the ingenious arrangements, that keeps you caught, the songs are all relatively simple and smart, but it’s the energy and the density, that take your mindfulness hostage, cause there’s no moment that seems dispensable, no second left to get distracted.
‘Dire Love Swarm’ holds you with dainty melodic bass line, (that shows the clearest parallels, in conjunction with wafting vocals, to some very early Cure-stuff) before we reach the last track already, which is named simple but poetical ‘Dew’, what gets on with that familiar energetic drive, created by the rattling drum-machine, the storm-like guitars and the voice, that appears like sheet lightning among the fast moving clouds for guiding us to an epilogue, that feels like reaching the above mentioned aim, short of breath, smouldering fires in the lungs pictured by noisy echoes and scintillating guitars… finally there or lost in the end…
Although ‘Enjoy Your Sorrow’ is a very short-time pleasure, it’s all the more intensive, filled up with trembling energy and tangible tension. It’s a great soundtrack for moving body and soul to, containing a straightness, that makes you feel both - absorbed and carried away. If there’s a full-time album somewhere down the road, I’d like to hear a bit more variety regarding to atmosphere and temper, some more shades of emotional expression to keep the dramatic arc this way of intenseness, but in a strange way I’m convinced that there’s no need to care about that. An impressing debut, that got me hooked on for more to come…
Tracklist
01. Me You And Nobody Else
02. Manila
03. I don’t know what I was waiting for
04. Dire Love Swarm
05. Dew
Line-up
Iacopo Bertelli – Vocals, Guitars
Alessandro Nieri – Bass, Synth
Website
www.myspace.com/myrockinmother
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 8
Sound: 8
Total: 8 / 10
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