The Italian quartet, apparently longest-known in scene circles for numerous other projects Sacred Grove gives on his debut Gem a vague first sketch of the far-reaching realms it intends to traverse.
The guitarists Paolo Monti (The Star Pillow, DAIMON) and Francesco Vara (Tristan da Cunha, Altaj), drummer Luca Scotti (Tristan da Cunha) and figurehead and singer Giulia Parin Zecchin (Julinko) locate the 32 minutes of their debut work in the doomgaze, gripping but that’s actually too short: with sacral crooning Ethereal Wave soprano vocals as a guide, they roam through an ethereal ambient darkness, in which the post-rock guitars shimmer shoegazing and the openly floating structures capture the elegiac atmosphere of a foreseeable goth aesthetic just as disembodiedly like contour-free postpunk associations between the lines. One may like to colleagues Massthe Lovecraft Sextet or even Enya im Portishead-Think intoxication, as well as on Esben and the Witch or Dead Can Dance – without Gem actually really sounded like one of those associations.
In any case, a fundamentally immediately engaging mood that the Italians create there – in sublime pieces like Be Dust (which as a highlight unfortunately only uses approximately the power of the generated wall of sound) is also the only one to unfold an unreal grandeur, provide dramatic melodies with subversive arcs of suspense and create the conditions for a strong panorama, especially in the first half of the record. Yes, it is really very engaging to step into the dreamy waves of the record, to surrender to the meandering aura almost meditatively and to observe from the peripheral field of foggy perception how Sacred Grove condense their six thoughtful songs, sometimes more impressively, sometimes more incidentally, and give them constructive space.
Nevertheless remains Gem Strangely unsatisfactory both as the sum of its parts and in the focus on the parts, each number feels over too early, because the compositions ultimately have no completely gripping climaxes that are too casual, and the stylistic MO, despite the perspectives, is not particularly complex, but for that but the coherence a bit unnerving unsurprising. At the back, the debut loses itself a little bit in its own idleness.
Means: Gem is a beguiling, underwhelming, interesting, captivating, half-baked first (perhaps just too short) attempt by an accomplished, competent group showing a lot of potential, whose relatively spontaneous, instinctive genesis is perhaps a touch too disadvantageous (because it remains superficial) to listen to.
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