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6.5
- Bands:
JULIE CHRISTMAS - Duration: 00:42:19
- Available from: 14/06/2024
- Label:
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Red Creek
Streaming not yet available
After having thrilled critics and the public with the three Made Out Of Babies albums and the Battle Of Mice project, both quite short-lived, between 2005 and 2010, Julie Christmas remained quite in the shadows, probably missing the opportunity to reach a wider audience, also considering how female voices in metal and hardcore have managed to gain consensus in the last decade. Even her only studio effort as a soloist, “Bad Wife”, remained an isolated episode.
The exit from the shadows coincided with the exciting collaboration eight years ago with Cult Of Luna for “Mariner” – for those who wrote one of the most significant albums of the last decade – followed by some selected live dates of great effect.
After a few more years of silence, the partnership with Johannes Persson, leader of the aforementioned Cult Of Luna, is renewed for the release of the singer’s second solo album, promoted by the Swedish post-metaller singer/guitarist’s record company.
Christmas’ first solo album is almost lost in the mists of time, if we consider the dizzying rhythms of contemporaneity: it was 2010 and since then a lot has changed in the world, musical and otherwise. “Bad Wife” exposed the more intimate and experimental side of the singer, who with Battle Of Mice and Made Out Of Babies had interpreted much rougher registers.
That work contained a lot of songs with a very broad spectrum, all driven by nervous restlessness and the taste for combinations of trembling and tending towards murky sounds, with noise and hardcore in persuasive and wavering guises to emerge, necessarily wanting to give more precise stylistic connotations, although ultimately it was above all a very personal songwriting bent that gave character and depth to the album.
As then, even today with “Ridiculous And Full Of Blood” we are truly offered a great abundance of sounds, sensations, suggestions, connections, so much so that initially the general discussion appears a little indecipherable, fragmented, prey to far too many different contents. It is necessary to delve deeper and enter into the folds of each single track, where in the end all the ambivalence between acidity/sweetness, anger/calm, infused by the singer’s personality, emerges.
The keyboards of Tom Tierney of On The Might Of Princess (historic post-hardcore/emo band from Long Island) bring ethereal and dreamy connotations, albeit distorted by more turbulent and hallucinated visions, to the tracklist, which willingly indulges in effected sounds, moments suspended and atmospheres that are quite difficult to describe, as in “”Supernatural” and “The Ash”. On other occasions the discussion is less fragmentary and more urgent, putting the singer’s hardcore soul in the foreground, although partly deconstructed and recombined by varied ingredients, which include alternative rock and shoegaze accents.
Changing register again, there are episodes with flashes of ecstatic calm, such as the delicately darkish start of “End Of The World”, characterized by particularly soft vocalizations, then broken by Persson’s loud voice, which brings some flashes of dense post-metal to the storytelling. This is, however, a song, like many others in “Ridiculous And Full Of Blood”, with changing tones, divided between a dreamy vein and an only partially expressed anger.
The sound framework, mixing post/hardcore guitars and keyboards between shoegaze and soundtrack, is always fascinating, while the tracks don’t always seem to scratch as much as one would like. The ecstatic and disturbing dimension together is the one that convinces us the most (the playful sounds of “Kids”, for example), but in general there seems to be a lack of push, not compensated by a vocal performance that can fill the void. We arrive at the end with the feeling that more could have been done: there are no bad or anonymous songs, but we couldn’t even find any that really struck us.
Honestly we would have expected something more incisive, even if the album is not at all disastrous and, perhaps, takes a long time to be fully understood.
