Enablers – Blown Realms and Stalled Explosions (Exile On Mainstream)
3/5
By: Richard Brant
Spoken word albums can often be full of dithering pretension and pomp, but Enablers’ growling emotive style kicks the crap out of that preconception, even if some of the posturing still remains. Blown Realms and Stalled Explosions is the soundtrack to the dark side of the street, a drunken lost stumble through mental anguish.
The odd chord progressions accompanied by Pete Simonelli’s cutting prose and poetry slice through the norm and bring a disturbed conglomerate of anxiety, anger and confusion along with welcome calming interludes.
‘Patton’ struts its way in to motion with this mentality firmly in place, the cycling guitars sounding like a drunk’s head spinning in to an alcoholic narcosis. Simonelli snarls in to lazy action over the top, bringing with it the standard hard hitting Enablers imagery. There is no let up as the jazz tinged drums of ‘Cliff’ are joined by the troubled sound of a piercing lead guitar which thankfully eases in to calm where the poetic charms deliver a dark descriptive story of an impending death.
‘Career-Minded Individual’ is some calm amongst the storm, with soaring guitars acting as a chorus in between versus, yet there’s always an uneasy undercurrent waiting to explode within Simonelli’s booming voice. Those uneasy jangling guitars return to taunt within ‘Maorandi: Natura Morta #86’ and ‘No, Not Greatly,’ with ‘The Reader’ enclosing this whirling descent in to a wondering mind with a cascading chords and snarling lyrics of false hopes.
‘Hard Love Seat’ almost has a Battles like quality to it, due to the math like precision of the guitars. This is an ode to the musicians behind the voice, and an excuse for them to let loose. It’s a fantastic instrumental highlighting what great musicians they all actually are.
‘Rue Giardon’ blasts its way through from end to end as the towering narrative booms over the top. At 2’37” it’s one of the shorter of the tracks on the album, but its intentions are rife in the yelling of such lines as “we can spurn them all on a feast of human disintegration.”
‘Visitacion Valley’ provides haunting spectral ambience that glides and unsettles as it reaches a climatic crashing finale with ghoulish howls. Using these howls, ‘A Poem for Heroes’ begins and nullifies this anguish with peacefully caressing guitars. The peace of course is shattered in typical fashion by the portrait of a broken soldier sat in a bar dousing the last embers of sanity.
This album is not an easy listen. In fact, it’s unfamiliar, at times disturbing and unsettling, but thematically that’s the whole point. Simonelli’s voice is brilliant…wild, manic, and booming, taking no prisoners. The instrumentation is unpredictable and untamed yet has a distinct precision which is fully down to the calculative nature of the compositions. My only criticism is that as two separate entities the voice and music can eclipse and cancel each other out at times, making lyrics hard to decipher. Whatever your opinion of this album, I’m not sure Enablers will care anyway - as Simonelli forcefully says in ‘No, Not Greatly’ they won’t be compromising any time soon…. “I will talk all night!”
Artists in this article: Enablers
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment