THE MOSTAR DIVING CLUB - Beautiful Forever

A road flooded with sunlight, grass brushing against skin, a stream flowing by. Moments of unexpected beauty, always ready to appear around the corner in the songs of Mostar Diving Club. “Beauty is spontaneous, it shines suddenly where you don't expect it”, claims Mircea Cartarescu, and the Romanian writer's words seem tailor-made to describe the music of Damian Katkhuda: “Poetry belongs to the instant, gratuitous and inexplicable. Its essence is rêverie”.

The dreamy gaze of Mostar Diving Club has accompanied us for more than fifteen years now, unmistakable from the artwork of the covers onward, yet every time the enchantment renews itself as if not a single day had passed. Katkhuda's writing has grown more intimate over time, less naive perhaps, and even his latest offspring, “Beautiful Forever”, once again touches the deepest chords, just as the previous “Glass Monkey” did.

A crystalline tinkling, an arpeggio, then a gust of horns. From the very first notes of “Looks Like Betty” it's a pacified Mark Linkous that immediately comes to mind, along with a Misophone devoted to simplicity. Katkhuda offers his assortment of melancholies with a smile that never surrenders to the darkness of the world, from the invitation to linger over small things in “Where The Birds Sing” to the humble wisdom of “Everyday Aviator”: “If you’re looking at the world with open eyes/ You’ll learn your lessons well”.

The interplay of keyboards and the singing saw sets up a ghostly little carousel over the notes of “Apples”, while the crepuscular waltz of “Into The Half Light” barely ripples the placid unfolding of the record. Lightness peeks through more discreetly than in the past (the eels-like strings of “Baby’s Coming Home”, the railway toward the promised land of “South Bound Train”), indulging Katkhuda's leaning toward the most chamber-like folk-pop.

In the gentle shadow of Nick Drake, “Garden Full Of Angels” blossoms into a heartfelt prayer, which seems to want to encapsulate within itself the invocation of that beauty of the forever that inspires the album's title. The piano stitches the melody, the tremor of the percussion grows more vibrant, in search of comfort and liberation.

Repeating that beauty will save the world sounds almost provocative today: do Dostoevsky's words still mean anything, those now overused words, while around us the very meaning of being human seems to dissolve? And yet, the lullaby of “River To The Sea”, placed as the record's seal, gives voice to those who have been stripped of all hope, to those crushed by history, to the oppressed of our present. And it challenges us to still believe in the irrepressible strength of humanity within man: “You can break my broken body/ You’ll just set my spirit free/ You can crush me like a flower/ But my roots are still in the ground/ You can build your walls around me/ I’ll get taller, tear them down”.

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08/09/2025