Rome is twenty years old and, since Berlin in 2005, has kept up the impressive pace of an album a year. While some are particularly memorable (Nera or Masse Mensch Material in the early years, The Lone Furrow or Parlez-Vous Hate? more recently), not only has the quality always been there, but Jérôme Reuter has managed to maintain musical and thematic coherence in his project while exploring new avenues. Inspired by the history of Europe and its key moments, his mix of neofolk and industrial martial was recently caught up in current events when Russia invaded Ukraine. Since the start of the war, Reuter has performed several times in Ukraine and released The Gates of Europe in 2023, in direct connection with the events. Rome has not released an album since. Has the artist had a bout of fatigue? Did he need to take a step back? In 2024, Rome ‘only’ released the beautiful EP World in Flames... but he was perhaps secretly preparing to celebrate twenty years of existence. Rome is releasing seven albums this year, including three today. Rest assured, there's a best-of in the bunch, as well as a follow-up to The Dublin Session and its plunge into Irish music. Civitas Solis, meanwhile, had been planned for a few years, before the war turned Rome's plans upside down.
Civitas Solis (The City of the Sun in English) is a utopia written in 1602 by the Italian Dominican monk Tommasso Campanella. It depicts an ideal fortified city where the inhabitants' possessions are pooled and where eugenics is practised to maintain selected traits. It's easy to see what might have attracted Reuter here, who sings of Europe in its fantasies, myths and glories, but also its illusions and failures, offering his listeners poetic questions that are more cryptic than explicit.
Musically, Civitas Solis inherits from Rome's previous albums, in particular the synthpop tendencies observed since Hegemonikon (dating from 2022, i.e. probably when Reuter started workin on Civitas Solis) which give In Brightest Black that danceable edge, that air of melancholy hymn despite its funereal text. Although he still excels at finding the unifying vocal line, the chorus that gets everyone singing along, Reuter is also a master of the sinister, the chilling. Hear him call for a severed head with his cavernous voice on Bring me the Head of Romanez and shudder. The skill with which Rome combines the distant threat of industrial martial percussion with his melodies is as seductive as ever (the heady La France Nouvelle, Food for Powder, on which we discover a more fiery Reuter than usual, abandoning his usual morgue for a moment, the gloomy By Tradition, whose whispers and choirs paint a sinister picture...). In this deep voice, which has not aged a bit in twenty years but has gained in depth, we can detect sadness, bitterness, contained rage and irony.
Rome alternates, as usual, between airy, liberated vocals and more oppressive parts, using samples to resurrect the past in order to tell us more about the present (in one dizzying gesture, Reuter likens our era to the 20s of the previous century, and we know where that led us). His most successful ballads, such as Tomorrow We Live, The Western Wall and Mar'yana, dance in a precarious balance between emotions, genres and eras, producing a bittersweet result that seduces as much as it haunts.
Today more than ever, Rome has taken on a pre-apocalyptic connotation. His songs seem to accompany the end of the world with nostalgia, disappointment... but always with an eye to the future. As usual, it's up to the listener to decide, or to let themselves be lulled by this singular voice, whose sober elegance does not prevent a certain lyricism or richness of emotion and sound. Let's wish Jérôme Reuter twenty more years of equally exciting creations... but it's for our own sake too, because that it would mean that we're still here to enjoy them.
