Bleeding Like Mine
Never Again Will I Dream…
Palace Of Worms
Bleeding Like Mine’s (BLM) darkly gorgeous album Never Again Will I Dream… evokes the desolate shadowlands between the love that has been lost and the new love that has not yet been found with painful clarity and an achingly beautiful sense of deep melancholy. Curt Emmer’s keyboard work for BLM is just outstanding, painting incredibly moving images and feelings out of deceptively simple melodies or even just a few spare notes. Dark synth, drums, and percussion lay the foundation for most of the tracks, augmented at times with perfect touches of cello, flute, and other instruments (all played by Curt, except flute on two tracks). Two vocalists lend their considerable talents, with Holly Emmer’s contributions tending toward the lovely, fragile, and plaintive and Hugues Dammarie’s being more aggressive, deeper, and often distorted. Points of comparison for the overall feel of the album might include Raison d’Etre, Arcana, or SoulWhirlingSomewhere (the last especially in terms of the lyrics), but really BLM are in a class very much their own.
I can’t do proper justice to BLM in words, and encourage you to simply buy the album if the above description intrigued you. Failing that, I can tell you that Never takes you through the depths of loneliness and despair, but also guides you to the hard-won heights of healing and moving on with your life. So many of the tracks on Never moved me so deeply that I really don’t know where to start. Perhaps with “Untitled #23,” and its throbbing bass drum, bell, atmospheric synth, and keyboards anticipating the advance of a demonic, trilling flute. Hypnotic, magical, and haunting, the instruments, together with the spooky, echoing, multilayered male vocals, set the stars spinning across the black velvet night, unknowable yet maddeningly familiar, laughing at our so-called wisdom that lasts just the span of one meager life. Or “And Now It’s Gone,” with its mournful, watery synth, wavering and tenuous; breathy percussion; echoing keyboards; and heavily treated female vocals way in the background delivered almost painfully slowly, the whole evoking a feeling of drifting lost far away at sea, with no familiar lighthouse to call you home now that your love is gone. And ending with “The Hardest to Let Go,” its low synth foghorn sounds blowing lonely, highlighted with bell-like tones, and beautiful keyboards, meditative but strong, the keys building slow confidence as the track proceeds, just like a healing heart does, then fading to the solo foghorn synth; the track has no vocals, which say loudly by their absence that all the lost voices in the lover’s head have finally quieted enough that s/he can hear the most important one of all – their own.
Palace of Worms Records: http://utenti.tripod.it/palaceofworms/
