There is something haunting and terribly truthful about Barcelona band Dame Area's LP Toda la mentira sobre Dame Area. It's an obscurantist and subjectively interoperable kind of truth though, a facet that partially accounts for its lingering, phantasmal nature. Once you have begun your journey through the record, it won't take long to see what I mean. A hostile aura greets your ears at the outset of "Innamorata del tuo Controllo," where a chillingly conceived and wimpling synth groans with a twisting howl like a banshee weaving its way through a discotheue's circuit breaker, producing a rain of sparks that baths a waiting crowd of revelers in a cleansing fire while singer Silvia Konstance Constan mutters a panting prayer of bridled hopes, pleading for the intervention of a tremendous outside force. Such deliberately nightmarish portraits are an essential part of Dame Area's exploration of an authentic modern vision of a world torn asunder and ensnared by conflicting dependencies between humankind and their creations. A place where an emancipated sense of authority is afflicted by a damnable and emergent rash of chaos, ingendering a further damned for control and an even more resilient bombardment of disarray. Almost to prove this point, "Hasta el Fin" begins with a suitably warm sweep of electronic melodies that complement an adorational murmur ushered forth by Silvia, a whispered intention whose inflection gradually becomes more sharp and intense as the surrounding electronic tones become cooler, more grating and panicked with conscious reverberations, as if a soul trapped within the borders of the track were slowly being lowered into a trench filled ice water until finally becoming submerged in the percolating silence of a glacial sarcophagus. Waves of siren sound methodically etch themselves across the membrane of "Danza dell'Equilibrio" searing like a laser carving ruins into a hunk of ore desiring to raise an iron golem. The lurking Italio-disco slink of "La Nueva Era" tastes the damp night air with its tongue between climbing arpeggios that rise in motley heaps as if they were the discarded regrets of a priestly figure, freshly scrubbed of his faith in the baptism of a midnight storm. The searching rhythms of "Vivo e Credo" sees the city outside your window as a maze of gothic intrigue where you can glimpse your shadow self running in the reflection of rain puddles, hurdling like a lover desperate to taste your lips, or a rat scampering to outrun a flood industrial discharge. Ghosts pass through the translucent barriers erected within the lustrious cavern walls of "Quando mi dicevi" before dissipating like closely guarded secrets into the aether, while "A volte sembra stia per finire" carries the uncanny reflexive ease of a talk therapy session with an AI counselor programmed to mirror your personality and paranoia back at you. The truth is, that sometimes the only choice we have, the only control we can earnestly exert, is a conscious decision to give ourselves over to the mayhem of the moment. If there is a lie in this, then it is one that you have told yourself, and one that only you believe.
Pressed and spinning thanks to BFE Records.
