God Machine - Sophia - An epic crossover

London, 1998: in the cult record shops, finding God Machine records was simply impossible; two years later, and a few Nick Drake records further on, I'd resigned myself to the idea that even just a CD by this band seems impossible to find. 2008: ten years on, still no reissue. And yet by now the world's critics have acknowledged the value of this trio's work, but the fate of a band consigned to myth has remained unchanged since 1994, the year the bassist died. The albums are collector's items, and you can't help wondering why Universal still doesn't seem inclined to reissue them. But let's start from the story.

After finishing high school in San Diego, Robin Proper-Sheppard, Jimmy Fernandez, Albert Amman and Ron Austin formed Society Line. They recorded a six-track demo, atmospheric and metallic, and started playing live. Robin moved to New York; everyone but Amman followed him. The trio changed its name and moved to Manchester, then to squats in London, then to Amsterdam and finally back to the English capital: thus God Machine were born, and from their earliest days on the road they already came across as a totalizing existential experience.

The tour begins in '91 in Camden; an EP for Eve, a deal with the legendary Fiction, two more EPs and two masterpiece albums.

The emphatic sound is evident from the very first singles: the trailblazer is "Home", a mystical-religious choir (a sample of "Le Mystère des voix bulgares", curiously used by Neurosis in the same year), a riff as heavy as hard metal, drums reverberating straight out of Hades, a hypnotic quality comparable to Kyuss (nobody talked about stoner rock back then, but they did talk about Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin). Layers and sublayers of noise guitars, saturated like Helmet's, futuristic effects that smack of the arcane, and once again the choir ushers us into the "Promised Land". We're contemplating God Machine's imposing, austere "cathedral of sound" — an apocalypse, a meeting ground between post-punk and prog, doom and stoner, dark psychedelic post-grunge wastelands and the most visionary strain of goth.

All the EP tracks would resurface on the debut album. Within Britain's elitist aristocracy, Robin finds his natural habitat and, like a cursed Byron, flees his misfortunes to Europe and writes desperate poetry. A sound that is a majestic, inspired crossover, original and innovative. Poised between a '70s-tinged rereading of grunge and the nascent post-rock movement, with '80s goth romanticism behind it.

Epic and apocalyptic, majestically emphatic, Scenes From The Second Storey is the band's first masterpiece album. "Desert Song" proves that this music is hypnotic and desperate; austere, mystical and ritualistic, sacred and violent: "Let God Save God" is the exhortation repeated endlessly. The psychedelia of Pink Floyd, grunge and the '80s of Ian Curtis. Kyuss meets a certain brand of alt-rock and folk singer-songwriting. On "Prostitute", Robin leans towards choral anthems and slogans in the style of Roger Waters, and he steals a riff from the Who's "Tommy".

"Commitment" confirms the sound: the noise-crossover power of Rage Against The Machine, romantic lyricism. In some ways similar to what Deftones would become, and to what would later be shelved under nu-metal. "Pictures Of A Bleeding Boy": two acoustic chords whispered the way the Cure would have done; Robert Smith and dark-punk echo again in "It's All Over". Proper-Sheppard knows how to write great songs, and in his lyrics he touches on real poetry. Essentially, Korn and Tool would offer a similar musical recipe shortly after, with different results.

"Dream Machine" uses radio-distorted voices and pneumatic drumming over a gloomy melody of imperatives. "Watch what you see, but don't say that you see it." "She Said" is the other ultra-grunge, post-hardcore track: devastating guitars and silences alternate at more or less rapid cadences to deliver lyrical tension and a vocal that glorifies the song's framework with profound sensitivity.

Then "Desert Song", "Home", "Temptation" — a stoner instrumental fit for a danse macabre — "Out" and "Ego" display an overwhelming emphasis, while "Seven", like other more intimate moments in the band's catalogue, offers two dark chords, a driving bass, guitars as saturated as those that would later dominate Mogwai, and a dreamlike, psychedelic vocal. The changes follow one another in a composite architecture of nervous tension: Robin loves repeating phrases endlessly, inventing bewitching inflections and underlining words with hypnotic effects that in this case dissolve into the improvised jazz of a saxophone.

"Purity", glorious and memorable, with classical arpeggios and cello, braces itself to face a furious dissonant charge and Sheppard's vocal loop. "The Piano Song", as the title suggests, lulls us to sleep with an atmospheric instrumental dark-punk piece. To sleep, because that's probably the only moment when God Machine get the attention they deserve, eyes closed and tuned in to the most imperceptible sonic shifts; these records are proof of just how spellbinding music can be; as Scaruffi points out, "God Machine's albums are often difficult to listen to, and the instructions for use coined by Kyuss for 'Welcome To Sky Valley' suit them well: Listen without distraction".

After the "success" of "Scenes..." comes the EP Home with several b-sides. There's an unreleased cover of KLF's "What Time Is Love", a circling metallic fury in the form of a glorious charge; Echo & The Bunnymen's "All My Colours" and Peggy Lee's "Fever", quite Badalamenti-esque; then "Rain" by the Morlochs and finally Bauhaus's "Double Dare": minimalism, two bass notes and a hammering, cadenced drumbeat, the low voice indistinguishable from the sonic magma of noise guitars; already in its martial finale, the band's typical symphonic streak is evident. Goth is an inescapable reference point for much of God Machine's music, which breathes the air of the '80s, including that spatial, rarefied yet dense Talk Talk atmosphere: of course Robin (if only because of the name) "had to" go to London. The band plays alongside the likes of Nick Cave, Quicksand, Cop Shoot Cop and Living Colour, then moves to Prague and records part of their second album, finishing it in England.

"One last laugh in a place of dying" opens the massacre with "Tremelo Song", majestic and razor-sharp, and the following "Mama" picks up the thread of the first record, redefining that imposing wall of sound (very Zeppelin) which seems bare but is in fact saturated with distortion and counterpoints of feedback, subliminally shifting the whole time like the best psychedelia.

One Last Laugh In A Place Of Dying on one hand smooths out the rough edges and lightens the cacophony, on the other it sharpens a style and unleashes at full gallop a deep songwriting vein, proving the band had accumulated enough maturity and inspiration to deliver a work of desolate beauty that captivates and disarms; here introspection takes over, with calm, solitary reflections alternating with violent outbursts of threatening, repressed rage. The formal heaviness lessens, letting music and words hover in the air and settle into a romantic place beyond worship; an unwitting epitaph, a concept album about death and solitude. Ironically, once recording was finished, Fernandez, struck down by a tumor, would not live to see its release, and would come to embody that unsettling, unfillable sense of emptiness prophetically sung about in the album's lyrics, fatalistically steeped in melancholic suffering.

The essence of God Machine lies in the second track, "Alone": a bass pumping in search of catharsis, and a wall of guitar distortion providing hypnotic, melodic counterpoint. The drums are crushing yet weightless beneath clouds of cymbals; imperceptible crescendos, the shifts building the pieces like suites: Robin "sits in the company of Kings" hoping "to know what wishes are", sees a girl outside warning him "you'll never understand, so don't even try", and rages back furiously, "So don't, don't, don't even try!"

Calm returns right after, ahead of "In Bad Dreams": a sober, autumnal earworm with intense cello. An acidic, hard dialogue of layered, alienating guitars opens the buzzing vortices of "Painless": "Well, I open my mouth but I hear no sounds, and you said life could exist without pain, I'm sorry, but that's not what I've found." "The Love Song" is minimal Albini (more refined) with schizophrenic surges (math-rock?), a hiccupping rhythm and a metallic voice: "I measure my steps with care, when there is ice on the road, and yet it still seems so far away..." "The Life Song" opens like a prayer, turns menacing, and closes: "And what do you see, my love; what do you see when you look inside, my love, my love..." The perfect symbiosis of lyrics and music, creativity and production finds its true home on this album; it happens in the funeral march of "Life Song" just as in the following track, the post-rock ballad "The Devil Song": "Stay away from me" repeated thirty times; every time the words change, the notes change too, swelling and receding, full and empty without respite, dragging everything toward a willed final chaos that implodes amid noise and radio-static voices, compressed and coldly logical, yet overflowing and oozing an inspiration that reaches truly superb heights.

And it's a cathartic symbiosis even afterwards: a neoclassical flair shapes the futuristic, cinematic folk of "The Hunter", which resolves into celestial choirs and elfin strings. After a barrage like that, the instrumental interlude "Evol" sounds like Shellac warming up with nothing but guitar feedback. But then come more post-rock ballads in "The Train Song", which weaves acidic harmonies over "…e Dio, voglio andare dove va il Sole" and then, over a spellbinding solo, sighs "ma lei è così fredda…", and again "The Flower Song", suspended in a void exploring desire, asking "Sarò per sempre da solo a contemplare il cielo, o imparerò a volare?". After such emphasis, originality and expressive urgency, it seems impossible that the tracklist could still build in intensity, and yet that very sequence is a liberating crescendo, and "Boy By The Roadside" is the album's climactic moment: the zenith of Sheppard's poetics, who ends up screaming wordlessly, accompanied by a gentle harmonica. After that, "The Sunday Song" is nothing but a hypnotic instrumental joke — three notes of bass and toy keyboard — just enough to avoid leaving emptiness and a dry mouth after so much grandeur. This time, you really do fall asleep.

Another masterpiece, a prophetic poem of presence-absence, the definitive testament of a historic band, one of the most inspired and original groups of the '90s.

After the bassist died of a brain hemorrhage in 1994, God Machine ceased to exist. A year later Robin would found the indie label Flower Shop Recordings (Elevate, Oil Seed Rape, Swervedriver, Copenhagen), and later go on to form Sophia.

Austin, who also moved to London, writes, directs and produces films.

In 2000 Sheppard recorded an album under the name The May Queens with Graham Miles, James Elkington (Elevate) and Dan Mulligan (Oil Seed Rape), already former members of Sophia. A rather unfortunate venture, a fun diversion leaning toward punk and more classic rock'n'roll, lacking the depth and completeness of his other two projects. "Tonite" resembles Sophia, while "Falling" or "Changes" are punk'n'roll in the style of early Rem. Then there's "Theme For The May Queens No. 1 and 2": the first a thunderous, slightly out-of-focus hard-rock gallop; the second a different matter entirely, garage-surf that's genuinely enjoyable and pairs well with the sickly vocals of "Rollin'". "If You Want It" is too commercial. "Like A Record" could pass for Evan Dando. "Fench" isn't bad either, but unfortunately the overall result feels fragmented and adolescent rather than cohesive.

Sophia inhabit an entirely different planet, a desolate and evocative expression of existential pain and emotional emptiness born out of the God Machine experience. Gone is the latter's nervous, metallic tension, replaced by a more classic indie-folk songwriting that owes much to the '90s but is rooted in the intimacy of Neil Young and Leonard Cohen.

While never rhetorical, Sheppard's dense writing is less poetic than it once was. The lyrics flow across the tracks like a river; they rarely wound, though they occasionally leave a mark. The melodies, on the other hand, are often killer, and once heard, you won't forget them. Where God Machine winked at England, Sophia draws from country music and American tradition.

On the debut Fixed Water, the menacing, electric drive is gone, but the majesty and emphasis remain intact. There's the country-pop lightness of "Are You Happy Now" or "Another Friend". There are gems exemplary in their simplicity (voice and acoustic guitar) like "Is It Any Wonder", "Last Night I Had A Dream" and "The Death Of A Salesman", with that timid, goosebump-inducing falsetto à la Morrissey. "I Can't Believe…" boasts delicate arrangements reminiscent of Pajo and his Aerial M. A touch too homogeneous, the album reveals that Sheppard had momentarily burned through the characteristic rage of his earlier work.

The same holds true on The Infinite Circle, which nonetheless exudes considerable inspiration. It opens with "Directionless", amid acoustic inlays, piano (Pullman?), whispered backing vocals and "Sto perdendo la mia direzione". "If Only" is slow and achingly poignant. The atmosphere of "I'd Rather" brings back the vocal and instrumental repetitions typical of God Machine (in the opening arpeggio and in the chorus), echoes that will resurface more than once. "Every Day" comes as a surprise with its excessively chart-pop refrain. The same old severity, in Sophia's hands, is seasoned differently, building simple yet monumental structures ("Woman"). The rather commercial "Sometimes" almost seems to send the album's fortunes soaring. The magnetic acoustics and the pained, whispered, distorted vocals plead with an intensity that rivals Sheppard's very best: "Non riesci a vedere cosa mi stai facendo? Oh, a volte non credo che riuscirò mai a dormire".

Not every track hits with the same force, but it remains a terribly sweet record, one with a palpable sadness. "Within Without" momentarily breaks the melancholy with a Who-like rhythmic finale. Right after comes "The River Song", whose very title points to its God Machine roots: the relentless, hypnotic acoustic guitar makes room for a burst of electric noise; the track could easily stand alongside "One Last Laugh…".

Overall, the only criticism is the material's excessive uniformity, which risks becoming tedious since it's made up almost entirely of slow, melodic acoustic ballads. Still, it's a terribly romantic album, delicately velvety, austerely simple. Robin has gone from metaphysical icon to serious singer-songwriter. And even though the ghost of God Machine still weighs on his shoulders, the vision his music reveals points positively toward a growing expressiveness and promises a bright future.

De Nachten comes out as a collection of live material. There are four unreleased tracks that lean into the band's epic-aesthetic side ("Ships In The Sand"), thanks to an ensemble of ten musicians. Then three classics, including "The River Song", and finally a cover of John Lennon's "Jealous Guy". Among the unreleased tracks, "Bad Man" deserves a mention, opening with a dry, funereal piano à la Nick Cave, before embracing a sickly falsetto worthy of a psychedelic murder ballad.

De Nachten stands out for its greater variety compared to Sophia's first two albums.

Having moved to a major label, the band changes course. "Oh My Love", the opener of People Are Like Seasons, is hyper-pop, an MTV-style power ballad: a distorted vocal melody, bass pumping away in God Machine fashion, a driving rhythm, abrasive acoustic and electric guitars, a killer chorus with a dreamy countermelody. I'm not sure how happy this will make Sheppard's fans, used to the exhausting exploration of his early albums, but the track is undeniably beautiful. "Swept Back" adds a cold, melancholic beat reminiscent of Malcolm Middleton, while "Fool", "I Left You" and "Another Trauma" return to Sophia's sound.

At this point "Desert Song No. 2" has us crossing our fingers in memory of God Machine, and it's a pleasant surprise steeped in nostalgia and compressed electricity. "Darkness" is a child of the '80s, somewhere between Matt Johnson and the catchier side of Trent Reznor. Some choices come across as a bit simplistic, like "If A Change Is Gonna Come", which starts out as garage-rock and turns into a power ballad; or "Holidays Are Nice", which opens promisingly with psychedelic echoes of Beatles-Floyd before getting lost in a syrupy Christmas-style chorus.

Overall, while this album offers new registers and shines for its diversity of shades, it's also true that it's far less focused than its predecessors and at times lacking in inspiration.

The same year saw the release, in a limited edition of 3000 copies, of Collections: One, a wonderful box set of unreleased material, put together with care and taste. "Genius" samples the reclusive world of Arab Strap, and it's that band's former female voice who sings on the cover of Pet Shop Boys' "You Only Tell Me…". More electronics on "Airports", horns on "Easy", "If You Want A Home" is unusual, seeming to tread a positive mood à-la Lemonheads, "Razorblades" is classic Sophia and, finally, an intense "Zinc" closes the record, which was distributed only through the live circuit and to fans.

Also on City Slang comes Technology Won't Save Us. The title track is cinematic emphasis: an acoustic gallop with strings, horns and piano that bursts into saturated clouds of distortion. "Pace" picks up the pace and fires off a refrain that tastes of brit-wave romantic à-la Duran Duran. "Where Are You Now" lowers its aim into a typically Sophia pop-ballad. "Big City Riot" deepens the despair, whispering a pained vocal. "Twilight at The Moscow" carries oriental touches, with trumpet and violins weaving one of the record's most striking atmospheres, reminiscent of Calexico.

"Birds" stands out for its freshness and understated horns. "Lost" picks up where "Pace" left off, while "Weightless" recalls a little of the paranoid sweetness of Arab Strap (also due to the obsessive acoustics and beatbox present); similarly, "Cherry Trees" opens with a slightly perverse vocal, adding bass and electric noise à la Afghan Whigs to pump up the cadence. The closing "Theme For The May Queens 3" picks back up the thread left hanging by the band's namesake side project: a bare-bones instrumental punk-grunge run.

On the edition with the bonus cd, we find "Bastards", off-key and slurred in the desperate paranoid style of Will Oldham; finally "I Left You", "Oh My Love", "I'd Rather" and "Pace" in minimal versions with double vocals and acoustic guitar.

The songs are, in practice, almost all beautiful and flawlessly performed, but the overall impression is that Robin hasn't brought out the best in himself, and that these numbers are merely pleasant divertissements, simple exercises to sharpen technique and fine-tune the sound. Listening to these tracks, one doesn't find the visceral quality typical of Sheppard's early work, so, as enjoyable and well-crafted as the album is in terms of sound production, one can only hope that inspiration returns to stir him now that the world has its eyes on him, awaiting new masterpieces from this visionary songwriter consigned to the wings of legend.

Proper-Sheppard seems intent on recovering Sophia's most intimately acoustic soul with the follow-up There Are No Goodbyes (2009), a record steeped in the painful romanticism of goodbyes, the last caress as a train's doors close.

Emphasized by Jeff Townsin's drums, the title track opens the album with the melodic swagger of Greg Dulli, paving the way for classic ballads in the vein of Joseph Arthur like "Storm Clouds" and "Obvious". The quick-grab rock of "A Last Dance (To Sad Eyes)" remains an isolated episode: when the bare chiaroscuro nakedness of "Dreaming" emerges, the record seems to rediscover Sophia's true depth.

A sense of tormented solitude wraps around the songs, starting with the psychoanalytic session of "Something", where Scottish singer-songwriter Astrid Williamson's voice echoes Proper-Sheppard's amid strings and piano. A melancholy pedal steel weaves through "Signs", while the bitter-tinged timbre of "Leaving" digs mercilessly into the folds of a relationship coming apart.

Proper-Sheppard makes no attempt to hide: "I suffered writing these songs," he admits. The line between sincerity and cliché risks growing thin, though, when his lyrics lend themselves to confessions with the flavor of a teenage diary, as in "Heartache". Yet the chamber-like epilogue of "Portugal" hints at a note of hope: "It's never too late to change".

The feeling is that the album's songs stop, more than once, at the most immediate emotional level. And the easiest path to the heart is almost never the one truly capable of reaching it in depth.

The band's return, a full seven years after There's No Goodbyes, finds one of its defining traits in being iconic: its songs, declamatory and imposing in their monolithic epicness, the marble-like production and the almost sculpted refrains ("St. Tropez/The Hustle") produce a stele instantly recognizable to Sophia fans.

And a few old, rumpled shivers can still be felt, even on As We Make Our Way (Unknown Harbours), even in the "grown-up" and somewhat generic shape of "Baby, Hold On", or in the "brushed" Americana, à la Greater Pacific, of "Don't Ask" and "The Drifter". The whole record, in fact, largely plays on clichés of melancholy and restlessness ("I'm a drifter, babe/You caught me on the road/So why don't you let me go"), and it's certainly not Proper-Sheppard's most inspired on a lyrical level (the existential "It's Easy To Be Lonely" is no exception, and "Resisting" verges on embarrassing).

On the arrangement side, there's also a certain "averageness" here, both in the youthfully choral codas ("Resisting", while "You Say It's Alright" is a choral coda) and in the more formulaic tracks ("The Drifter", "Don't Ask").

Despite the overall impression of a solemn procession with grave, imperious tones, the writing and execution of the record actually place it closer to a midstream "alt-rock" product (the baffling "Blame", the socio-political attempt "California"), in a parallel that's not especially flattering (for Sophia) with the current output of Low.

In the end, the whole thing succeeds, bringing together music, lyrics and performance, as a sort of explanatory primer on what the movement Sophia were part of wanted to express – spelled out for newcomers.

The novelty that defines Holding On / Letting Go (2020) is that, alongside Robin Proper-Sheppard's all-round creativity, Sophia present themselves as a proper band for the first time since their debut "Fixed Water".

Besides drummer Jeff Townsin and bassist Sander Verstraete, already present on As We Make Our Way (Unknown Harbors), guitarist Jesse Maes and keyboardist Bert Vliegen were also brought in.

The contribution Proper-Sheppard can bring to indie-pop is immediately clear in "Alive", released as a preview single in March. An elegiac, sensual ballad marked by Terry Edwards's yearning, melancholic saxophone, it stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the synthetic '80s-derived sounds and distorted guitars of the opener "Strange Attractor". Over the course of the track, the lines between indie pop, new wave and post-punk blur into a pulsing journey that is at once dreamlike and transcendental.

Once again the Sophia collective has lived up to the great expectations.

Contributions by Antonio Ciarletta ("People Are Like Seasons"), Gabriele Benzing ("Technology Won't Save Us", "There Are No Goodbyes"), Lorenzo Righetto ("As We Make Our Way"), Cristiano Orlando ("Holding On / Letting Go").

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