In 2023 Norwegian Adrian Borgia gave unlife to BRIDES a post-punk / darkwave / gothic-rock project that he himself defines as a ‘pop orchestra’. Real goths would never say they were goths, that would be so mundane! As productive as ever, the artist is already releasing his second album, Sandcastle, a year after Doom Profits.
If sandcastles evoke something ephemeral and transitory, fragile and futile, Some Kind of Reptile defies time: reptiles, a recurring figure at BRIDES (remember the release of Real Reptile last autumn), are a bit like dinosaurs. They're old, they're cold-blooded, they're cool: they're like real goths! Oh no, sorry, we're not supposed to say ‘the g-word’, even if this first track has a few spectral echoes of Lucretia my Reflection sighing under the cobwebs. And by the way, The Sisters of Mercy (whose Floodland and its heavy groove are never far away here) weren't goths either, please don't go upsetting Grandpa Eldritch!
Adrian Borgia has developed his own distinctive style: he loves lo-fi and otherworldly reverb. Here again, his voice is a shadow, a ghost, and the minimalism of his music makes it all the more gloomy, evoking both the darkness and the rigorous yet chaotic lines of expressionist cinema. Somewhere between post-punk and synthpop, the tracks are short, each developing a simple idea, a catchy hook that sticks in your head, a hypnotic melody. Borgia plays the melancholy crooner (Gold) or croaks his refrains in a cavernous voice as if his throat were parched by a few centuries of slumber (Dark). Remember that gothic habit of avoiding the g-word? BRIDES also calls itself ‘synthpop’, and towards the end of the album, those synthpop influences actually feel like some made in Vancouver industrial when the hallucinatory synths layers of Here collide with a blistering drum machine in a way that Skinny Puppy would not have denied. If you're going to dance, do it with your arms hanging limply at your sides, your eyes riveted to the ground.
So just because Sandcastle lasts less than half an hour doesn't mean it's a stingy or cheap album. On the contrary, Adrian Borgia continues to have the time of his life, offering us another sinister but romantic panorama. His dark attitude is, inevitably, a tad sophomoric and, consequently, rather enjoyable (even if good practices demand that we laugh inwardly, we're not going to distort our centuries-old faces with ugly smiles). As it should be, the adventure comes to an end at dawn, with the melancholy Daybreak signalling it's time to return to the vault and take shelter from this hideous sun and, in the solitude of the tomb, to recall a few fragments of existence. It all lasted just one night, small crumbs of eternity and darkness both memorable and insignificant, but we'll keep the ghosts with us as we wait for this Norwegian vampire, somewhere between the putrid air of Count Orlok and the rock'n'roll spleen of Only Lovers Left Alive, to return with a new collection of his pop anthems.
