Usually, when you go to hear one of the groups of the heart live, the hope is that she gives us its best songs, so as to justify the ticket price and all the other money spent, over the decades, to buy its CDs, books, gadgets and videotapes. In the case of the And Also the Trees, however, it is very difficult to establish which they are, given that in over forty -five years of activity, large exploits are not remembered, nor any particular hit. But, after all, the beauty is precisely this: every time they leave you the intoxicating feeling of the discovery, similar to that shock that is felt on the first appointment, as if we had never yet listened to any of their albums, when in reality we have them at home one by one, only perhaps a little dusty. And judging by the last exciting performanceit would be time to withdraw them out of the shelves.
On May 21, in Rome, we were about a hundred faithful waiting for them at the Miriam studio, a welcoming and well -equipped recording room located in the Don Bosco area, on the Tuscolana, attached to the San Gabriele dell'Addolorata parish. The band, for those who did not remember him, had been founded in 1979 in Inkberrow, a village of the Werccestershire, by two couples of brothers, Justin and Simon Huw Jones and Graham and Nick Havas, who had managed to earn immediately a name in the Darkwave circuit so as to attract the attention of the care: Robert Smith called them to make him from Opening Act For the dates of several tours, then he helped them produce their debut EP “from Under the Hill”, while Lol Tolhurst put hand to the single “Shantell/Wallpaper Dying” and the first full-length Eponimo “And Also The Trees” of 1984.
Despite lightning -free popularity, in commercial terms they would have collected less than deserved, yet they never stopped making music. Those who have continued to follow them know that they boast a level curriculum and in valuable evolution: after the publication of “And Also the Trees”, “Virus Meadow”, “The Millond Years” and “Farewell to the Shade”, considering their classic LPs of the eighties, artistically they have grown up very much, moving away from the post-punk sounds of the exhorts to the expressive language. Refined and free from labels, full of folk and jazz influences, which draws inspiration, both in the lyrics and in the instruments used, by the landscapes out of time and by the rural dimension of the surrounding environment, recalled ad hoc From Dulcimer, Oboe, Piano and Clarinet, XYLOPHOPH AND REGISTERY, RIVERBERS AND delaythe guitar pinched as if it were a mandolin and in the background a discreet, essential and never intrusive electronics.
The concert of the other evening, announced sold-outbegan with half an hour of delay and was opened by The Second Nature, a valid Roman shoulder group made up of Leonardo Mirenda, Lorenzo Ziccolella, Fabio Bonanni and Mauro Cola. The four, who have just churned out the EP “Stone Marten”, have impressed favorably with a mixture of art-folk, prog and psychedelia, before making a wide, around 9.40 pm, to the most awaited protagonists, the aforementioned And Also the Trees, who in these days, in Italy, have also made a stop in Bergamo, Rosà (province of Vicenza), Florence, Caserta and Pescara (on June 14 in Bologna at Bologna. of the “Botanique Festival”). In the capital they were missing since October 2016: then they had come to present the excellent “Born Into the Waves”, today it is up to their fourteenth effort in the studio “Mother-Of-Pearl Moon”, of 2024, one of the most mature and complete works of the recent catalog. In addition to soundin the meantime also the line-up It has been radically renewed, and next to the only survivors of the original nucleus, Justin and Simon Huw Jones (respectively guitar and voice), today there are Grant Gordon on bass, Paul Hill on drums and Colin Ozanne, who divides himself between guitar, keyboards and clarinets.
The prologue is entrusted to Justin Jones, who skillfully weaves a delicate instrumental “intro” (it is theOuverture Of “Mother-Of-Pearl Moon”, in fact), then the real show begins when Simon climbs on stage, which had remained deflected in the shade a few meters further. The singer, today sixty -five years old, appears in splendid and always well -kept shape, like the elegant coat he wears over the waistcoat and the white shirt that give it that decadent charm of a cursed poet. It is not a mask, but the same nineteenth -century dress that dress more or less all its songs, whose verses tell of adventures by sea, merchants and storms, of ghost cities and enchanted forests, duelists and sirens, fierce beasts, angels and demons.
The characters come and come from history, from myth and literature, sometimes they are real and other invented, nobody knows how to grasp the difference, so much is the drama of the interpretations of the frontmanwhich dominates everything else and makes each fantasy credible. The cruel “The Whaler” are a wonderful example, which tells of a whale hunter at the mercy of a shipwreck, the anxious “Town Square”, built with a technical end on rhythmics shuffleand the ballad restless crescendo that “Mother-of-the-pearl moon” certainly constitutes one of the most shiny Highlighttogether with the title track and to the suggestive “Valdrada”, which adequately translates the mirages of “The invisible cities” of Italo Calvino into notes. “The ancients built Valdrada on the banks of a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other and high streets overlooking the water the sauce in Balaustra. Thus the traveler sees two cities: one straight above the lake, and a reflexed reflected. The two twin cities are not the same, because nothing that exists or takes place in Valdrada is symmetrical: every face and gesture respond to the mirror. Reverse gesture, point by point ”. So he wrote, in summary, Calvino in 1972, and and over fifty years later, the ghosts of this dichotomy hover in a complementary way in the works of the “Trees”, as the long -standing fans who confuse themselves among the (few, to truth) files of chairs are nicknamed them: someone proudly shows off a shirt of the Ramones, some of the talk talks, someone of the Sad Lovers and Giants, We might think of being a pathetic revival for old glories and instead a exciting flight to the present has just taken off, suddenly interrupted by a black out electric that forces the band to the suspension for about ten minutes.
We take the opportunity to finish and take a drink, then we start again shipped with “Your Guess”, a very high canto -acting jewel that, like almost all the productions of the last period, for stamp and emotional impact immediately recalls the most sober and less split nick quarry, but at times also Leonard Cohen, the Mick Karn Solist, Scott Walker or Gavin Friday: the references are Multiple, there are many compositional horizons that the English band has caressed over the years.
“The Suffering of the Stream” (you can listen to 1988 “The Millond Years”), “There Were No Bounds” (from the 1985 EP of 1985 “The Secret Sea”) and “Virus Meadow” (from the 1986 LP of the same name, is one of the most acclaimed by those present) are a nostalgic dive into the most exquisitely Gothic aesthetic of the past, which also permit the work, Subsequently, however, in a key different, adult and conscious, where melancholy is no longer condemned, but rather becomes inner force and creative impulse.
“Paradiso” and “Brother Fear” (from “Angelfish” of 1996) are a delicious mid -nineties parenthesis, a phase in which the group added ingredients of lounge music And r'n'b to their sound baggage: both have that Feel cinematographic that would have done well in the soundtrack of a Tarantino film. So the atmospheres return dark and meditative on the arpeggios of “dialogue”, in “Domed” and in the passionate “in a Bed in Yugoslavia”, of a gypsy flavor, the result of the numerous experiences of the Trees who have been invited several times in these years to perform in countries like Romania, Ukraine and Lithuania, greatly expanding the range.
To reiterate the formula, the risk of running is a certain repetitiveness, but fortunately not monotony, since every trace is a enjoyable pièce To itself, with a well -defined identity, carved by theatrical interpretations of the race, turbulent and vigorous, from which it is impossible not to get involved. Perhaps even too much vehement, I ironize someone, given that Simon Jones often recites kneeling on the ground, with his eyes closed or holding a book of poems in his hand: a rock star has never been, but if he would still like to do time to become so, moreover arrows on his seduction span he has how many he wants. Someone had unwillingly underestimated them, but after the show we are witnessing we will have to change their mind.
New quick break And we came to greetings: the encore offers two of their most iconic pieces, “A Room Lives in Lucy” and the inevitable “Slow Pulse Boy”, mini-inno from “Virus Meadow”, from 1986, on whose notes the curtain falls. We are really satisfied with it, hoping to see them again soon. Often, speaking of an artist, it is used to say that time has stopped, but for some, we are convinced of it, it is better that you continue to go on.
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
