Turn off your bright smiles, lower your voices, take off your hats: Nero Kane is back with a fourth album, and it demands a certain solemnity. The Italian dark folk artist once again explores his favourite themes: death, love, death, mysticism, death, poetry, death, the past (which is dead) and death. This sets the scene, preferably in black and white, austere and mysterious.
As an Angel's Voice, with its mournful layers and Marco Mezzadri's hallucinatory, elegiac incantations, is a perfect illustration of this point: between spectral romanticism and misty ritual, there is enough space in this minimalism for the listener to project their own ghosts. In its sobriety and economy of effects, Nero Kane ultimately exudes a form of contemplative theatricality from which the slightest sound seems to leap forth and take on a cryptic, sacred meaning. Below, you can discover the superb video by Samantha Stella, who is responsible for the visuals and also lends her voice to several tracks. With a track lasting almost ten minutes, Nero Kane has hypnotised us, imprisoning our souls in his feverish, arid visions with their gloomy gravity.
One wanders through the album as one might lose oneself in the ruins of a church. With its few chords played on repeat and its twilight poetry, Nero Kane brings to mind a strange cross between the absolute elegance of Jozef Van Wissem (without the lute), the chanted lyrics of Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio, without the martial aspects and the sinister Americana of King Dude (for example on Mountain of Sin), as if all these fine people had come together to compose the music for a vision of american gothic directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. A little blues (My Pain Will Come Back to You), a little dark ambient, a guitar that appears like a mirage in the desert (Unto Thee Oh Lord)... despite the minimalism, there is no shortage of shadows. The solemn echoes of Land of Nothing envelop us as Samantha Stella's deep, solemn voice rings out for the first time on the album. Located halfway through, this funerary monument with its gothic lamentations (a hint of Batcave, a touch of Anne Clark) is impressive.
While Nero Kane seems to hold back his music, refusing to allow it to become overly demonstrative, what it conveys is all the more powerful. Vast landscapes, the immensity of time, infinity... All of this could have been composed in the dim light of a tiny room by the glow of a single candle, but it plunges us into a universe where time and space no longer have any authority. The World Heedless of Our Pain resonates like a song that has travelled through the ages, a secret whispered in the heart of winter during funeral vigils. There is no End, Nero Kane sings towards the end of an album that ends on a note of hope with Until the Light of Heaven Comes: we sense that this ray of light may take a few more eternities to appear. Let the light take its time, we'll stay here in the darkness, revelling in this haunting piano with its otherworldly reverberations. It's beautiful when music gives the impression of being lost in a haunted house for eternity.
