IN THE NURSERY - 1961

Twins Klive and Nigel Humberstone return to the scene with an album inspired by 1961, the year of their birth. The English group continues its thirty-year career with a record that moves between dark–synth/new age sounds and delicate orchestral symphonies, with an evident passion for the darkest and most intimate film scores. It's no coincidence that this work follows their soundtrack for Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel's 1928 silent film, “The Fall Of The House Of Usher”.

“1961” is dense with historical and cultural references, but above all it floats in a dreamlike atmosphere that dissolves post-punk attitude into a kind of sui generis neoclassical darkness. Above everything looms the sense that something, from that year to the present day, has been going wrong: what prevails is an atmosphere of pervasive melancholy, as romantic as it is decadent.

“Until Before After” opens the album by merging the band's wave attitude with a murkily grandiloquent, classicizing taste, well underscored by the drumming of David Electrik and the voice of Dolores Marguerite C, the latter a longtime collaborator since the days of “Stormhorse”.

With “Torschlusspanik” we step fully into the spirit of “1961” with a track inspired by the construction of the Berlin Wall: a dark ride through feelings of anguish and fear amid the future cultural and social wreckage of the Cold War to come.

There's no shortage, however, of moments where biographical details peek through the maelstrom of political and social references on the album. “Grand Corridor”, for instance, speaks of the corridors of the “Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital”, the hospital where the Humberstone brothers were born, which fell into disuse in 1985 and became one of the UK's most legendary and famous haunted sites. Amid memories, hauntology and founding myths, In The Nursery compose their own personal, spectral elegy here.

There are also several literary references revolving around that fateful year. “Pacify” draws inspiration from Joseph Heller's postmodern American novel Catch-22, while “Solaris” refers to the science-fiction novel of the same name by Polish writer Stanisław Lem, published in 1961, which also inspired the cinematic masterpiece by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, made in 1972.

Both “Retrofire” and “The Earth Was Blue” tackle the history of the space race, another hot topic of the Cold War. In the first track, with its epic, martial pace, we can hear a recording of Yuri Gagarin's voice describing his experience returning to Earth, while the second is dedicated to Alan Shepard, the first American in space. “The Earth Was Blue” closes the record with a kind of view from above, amid melancholic keyboards and emotional shadows that search within memories of the past, including the conflict between East and West, for answers to the doubts of our present.

“1961” is a fine work that reveals the interesting evolution of In The Nursery: without any major upheavals, but showing their excellent ability to translate complex themes into their own personal emotional spectrogram. An album recommended, then, to all fans of the English group.

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19/05/2018