Artist: Salvation AMP
Title: Earth We Walk Upon
Genre: Goth Rock / Guitar Wave
Release Date: 18th April 2015
Label: Self-released
Album Review
Sometimes there are moments when your soul asks for something familiar, for something to rely on, something to feel safe within. Not an artificial cocoon, not one of these fleeting mirages, whose boneless skins miss a breathing, a beating, a touching, no, something that is palpable and alive, something made of flesh and blood. And these are the moments when it is good to have a SALVATION AMP album around. Two years after ‘Hidden Faces’, the threesome from Detmold/ Germany brought a new long-player into the world, meaningfully named ‘Earth We Walk Upon’ and somehow they managed again to create something that affects you, that shrouds you in and clutches you, despite its unobtrusiveness and diffidence.
For avoiding any misconceptions relating to my introducing words - their second output is all but comforting, lulling or calming! There´s a certain kind of shiver lurking down the surface, a sonic coldness emerging from a tenuously spun hopelessness, a despair brushed by the cold wind of a resignation. "We move around in circles, trying not to be scared... Where do I go when there´s no way to go to...?" as the mighty ‘Mother Talk’ is pondering forebodingly. And so it is not the image of a pristine beach, not the crying of the seagulls or a light breeze over dunes what the album´s introducing sound of the sea calls into life retrospectively, it is a grey and icy ocean, sublime and primordial, untamed and muddy, perceptions hitting the shore. So like the disarmingly fragile ‘Anachron’ with its majestic melancholy, dressed in swarms of guitars which seem to spread their sound in all directions, clean and distorted, timid and thundering. Or the imperious ‘Oxygene’, what starts as a sonic breathing, driving the vocals and the lonely chords over a wide empty plateau for becoming an ethereal storm of wailing flingers and delays, steering bass lines and rampant drums
‘Way’, what shines by its interplay of glasslike verses and bridges of towering rocks for culminating in a chorus that oscillates between catchiness and gloom, or the marching ‘Shine’, whose menaces hides behind a weightlessness of melody and twilight reflected. And it is always when the vocals enter the scenery that you feel the truthfulness, the conviction the protagonists act from. There is no mask, no hypocrisy or artificial attitude, no willing deep tone-masquerade or contrived emotion, the words seem to come unfiltered from the heart, free from ingratiation and lines like: “I used to be uncertain, always been too kind... Where should I run where there´s no place to run to?..." leave no doubt that there is somebody telling what he thinks and feels.
But despite that, the band´s main timbre is (again) the guitar and all its scope and it is fascinating how they create such a variety of moods and atmospheres just by one instrument. It weaves and smashes, strokes and slashes, bears crystal copes and causes rock falls and accompanied by the velvet and balanced framework of the bass it is pure joy to feel them merge, drifting apart, circling around each other and spanning distances and here and there deferentially quoting from the band´s obvious musical influences. Like the above mentioned ‘Mother Talk’ that evokes a spherical vast reminding the elysian landscapes of FIELDS OF THE NEPHILIM´s classic or ‘Prince of Silence’, which is joyfully pointing to the shimmering and sprawling guitar wave of the ones like THE CHAMELEONS.
Yes, in fact it is not the reinvention of a particular genre what the three gents celebrate on ‘Earth We Walk Upon’, but the intensity of playing, the wealth of detail and the density of moods suggest that this was never an intention. It is a kaleidoscope of imprints and reflections, of influences and translations, never too haughty for not bowing to musical guides and always too creative and self-sufficient for transcribing thoughtlessly. It´s a profound piece of music, proving that it´s the invisible core, where the creating force arises from.
Tracklist
01. I am the Flood
02. Mother Talk
03. Oxygen
04. Anachron
05. Way
06. Shine
07. Prince of Silence
08. Earth we walk upon
09. These Days
Line-up
Christ-Ian LeDing – Vocals, guitars
Caveman – Bass
Steve Leafs – Drums
Website
https://www.facebook.com/salvationamp
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 8
Sound: 8
Total: 8
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