CELEBRATION - Celebration

It's neurosis as a prelude to ruin, nails digging into bleeding flesh during a savage embrace, the shrill, monotonous wail of a siren, dreams of a happy wedding officiated in hell. "Deliri, Desideri e Distorsioni" ("Deliriums, Desires and Distortions"), to quote the latest Lester Bangs anthology published in Italy, and there's no better way to describe the sonic spit with which Celebration burst forcefully into the jagged universe of rock music.

Deliriums: she must be yet another sensitive soul devastated by existential nightmares, Katrina Ford. It has to be that way; otherwise there's no explaining music that's perpetually teetering on the edge of the precipice, unstable, systematically set on shattering melodies, on spewing out harmonies that balance on damnably precarious equilibriums. An example? The opening "War", with Ford's raving expressiveness and the instruments falling in line behind her astonishing vocal evolutions. There's no songwriting process in Celebration's music, only eruptions of sound tamed into submission by the emotions of this nauseated rock witch.

Desires: at times a hint of 4AD-style dream pop emerges, only to be immediately cut short, like the muffled thrashing of a sound wave trapped inside a tin can, like Devics unable to let their expansive fantasies burst forth, submerged instead in the vacuum of a completely out-of-sync Nick Cave, in the manner of "Burning The Ice" with Die Haut. And so we're left entranced by "Holiday", an unfinished ballad, made so by sustained yet halting rhythms, and by a bluesy delivery that recalls old Joplin-esque legacies. And then there's "Diamonds", a ballad proper this time, though still steeped in psychedelic menstrual hallucinations.

Distortions: distortions are in short supply on "Celebration", at least if we use a Babes In Toyland record as a yardstick. What dawns instead is a vision that's skewed but not forcibly twisted. The jagged rhythms form an inescapable web, through which parabolic Hammond trajectories wedge themselves, as in "New Skin", a possessed sabbath lifted from some early-80s positive punk band. Or the galloping "China", where the music lurches forward unruly, driven by overbearing funk grooves.

More than a record, an erotic ritual of sensory self-mutilation.

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13/03/2006