All artists are allowed poetic dialogue with lights and shadows, few are allowed access to those infinite nuances where fantasies and disillusionments reside.
With the album “Mental Home Recording” Philip Parfitt, ex-member of Perfect Disaster, has crossed the forbidden boundaries, giving us one of the most intense records of the last decade, a folk-psychedelic fresco of rare beauty.
In truth, it wasn’t easy for the English musician to put together the various pieces of a less than successful artistic career. After having recorded albums with various bands – The Varicose Veins, The Architects Of Disaster, Orange Disaster, The Perfect Disaster, Psychotropic Vibration, Oedipussy and Littleweed – and after having captured the success in the creative splendor that hit the English scene of the 80s, the his career continued in the shadows, reawakened only by a recent, albeit feeble, critical response.
Consistency and intellectual honesty are the two elements at the basis of Parfitt’s career, a singer not in love with his own melancholy and tired, yet familiar and comfortable voice, an author with a clear and natural line, a cultured but never pretentious musician. He also makes good use of these qualities in his latest album “Dark Light”, an elusive, fascinating, different album, perhaps less cohesive than the previous one, but equally vigorous and poetic.
The splendid cover by Fernando Ruibal, the photos by Sarah Baba, the illustrations by Joane Charlotte Senechal and the drawings by Anna Mort are the right backdrop to sad (“Broken”), dreamy ballads (“In Every Thought”, “29000 Raindrops (In The Forest Of My Heart)”), inspired (“In Every Thought”, “Let’s Build A Bridge”), as always inclined towards a delicate psychedelia that refers both to Church (“A Little Longer”, “I Know I Shouldn’ t, But Voices”) than Robyn Hitchcock (“Black Widow”, “Too Little Too Late”) or velvety and unhealthy songs in the style of Lou Reed (“A Look Inside”).
It is difficult, however, to imagine the fate of a record like “Dark Light”, a project not inclined to compromise, faithful to a musicality with cultured features, but above all linked to an ethics that is not suited to that planned obsolescence that now dictates the rules of art too. The eleven songs of this new album, rather than giving answers to the many questions of current times, offer moments of reflection to which to entrust the last requests of free men, a continuous dialogue between shadows and lights which finds perfect exegesis in the song with two reciting voices which gives its name to the entire collection: a solitary and twilight digression that slowly fades towards silence.
05/26/2024
