LIFELOVER "Erotik" CD

There's a difference between sad music and depressing music. To me, sad music is more about the actual sounds and melodies. Bands like Mogwai and My Bloody Valentine and Slint deal in certain kinds of emotional triggers, and while much of music created may indeed be mournful or melancholic, there always is that ladder climb to an intense, triumphant catharsis-this music makes your skin prick up and you feel elated and hopeful and filled with a love of just being here and exisiting. And then there's a band like Lifelover, who i can truly call depressing becasue listening to their music makes me feel like they must have felt when they created it. This is music that has so much power and gravity that it pulls you into its painful nether and just keeps pushing down until you feel what it actually is- tortured confessions of regret and sorrow and failure. This is why black metal is the music i love the most -no other music is able to pull me so close and envelop me and make me identify with the actual emotions involved in its creation. That's why Lifelover are so amazing to me as a band, and also why it really isn't fair to simply label them black metal. Sure, the roots are there-there's the ultra fuzzed out guitars and the thick dense drum machine sounds thudding your brain into ooze, and of course there's so many different style of grating, shrieky vocals and suicidal melodies from tinny, caustic guitars. But there's also gorgeous and muddy clean delayed guitars, hypnotic swathes of melodic murk and backwards looping tapes and sprinkles of high end pianos leading the way to despair. And the lyrics-of what's in English (two songs, the others are in Swedish, i believe), it's simply some of the most honest and beautiful lyrics about frustration that i have ever heard. These are songs of loss and hopelessness, dripping with self loathing and anger at having made so many mistakes, and scorned by memories that will never ever be recaptured. The prevalent theme is of loss, of self, of identity, of hope...the artwork is shot through with blurry images of colorful nighttime city scenes and intense splashes of violence and blood, making you feel the abandonement that one feels when you're completely alone. The world is huge, and empty, and with no one, there really is a sense of coldness and dread. The fear will always grow, knawing away at the person you were until all that's left is a wrecked paranoid shell subsisting on what once was and what could only have been. This is an absolutely visionary record, more honest than anything i've heard with maybe the exception of Mark Kozelek (another artist who can actually draw you into his psychoses), and i don't think that i will hear anything as gorgeously defeatist as what Lifelover have created. This is a new mark for black metal, ultimately surpassing even their own spectacular debut record and setting themselves alongside such revered practitioners as Shining, Forgotten Tomb and Xasthur. This is a record of true and frightening feelings. You can't be unaffected by this. Powerful, powerful music is being forged. We're lucky to be allowed into Lifelover's world.

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