Leon Faun REM. PHASE album review by Anna Ida Cortese
«We are made of the same stuff that dreams are made of; and our short life is contained in the space and time of a dream.” W. Shakespeare
Leon Faun come back with REM. PHASEnew album released by Walkin' Records with distribution TheOrchardanticipated by Gunpowder, Dark melody And Mon amour.
Crossing REM. PHASE I had the sensation of entering a poorly lit room. Not full darkness, not day. Rather that strange moment when you wake up but you're still not sure if you've come out of the dream.
It is a record that lives entirely in that threshold: between nightmare and awakening, between lucidity and confusion, between the desire to disappear and the almost physical need to say “I'm still here”.
The return of Leon Faun it doesn't sound like an orderly rebirth. It's more like someone who looks in the mirror after a long night, recognizes themselves in pieces, and decides to get back on their feet anyway.
Leon Faun, a record in which dreams do not console
The title REM. PHASE it could immediately make you think of the dream as an escape, as an imaginative space in which to take refuge. But here the dream almost never consoles.
It is a transit area. A mental room where fears, toxic loves, anger, pressures, the ghosts of the industry, the feeling of always being a little out of place return.
Leon Faun over the years he has built a recognizable imagination, full of creatures, symbols, lateral worlds, fantasy references and crooked fairytale visions. In this album, however, that world seems less like a refuge and more like a battlefield.
There is still the Faun, there is still Mairon, there are still dragons, labyrinths, wizards, shadows, story characters. But everything appears dirtier, more urban, more wounded. As if fantasy no longer served to escape from reality, but to make it bearable without having to tame it.
Between love, hate and relationships that don't save
One of the strongest threads of the album is love, but not intended as a safe haven. In REM. PHASE love is often something that burns, confuses, holds back, makes you lose coordinates.
In the lyrics a relationship continually returns that never manages to be just a relationship. It becomes a mirror, guilt, addiction, detonator. The other is almost never just a person: it is a place where Leon Faun projects desire, anger, memory and fear of collapse.
In Mon amour love has something magnetic and repelling at the same time. In Two Hours it becomes a room where the noise does not pass. In Split it turns into a real, almost surgical fracture, with the ego dividing itself between what it feels and what it can no longer support.
The interesting thing is that the album never tries to dignify this toxicity. It doesn't make it completely romantic. He looks at it, falls into it, sometimes uses it as fuel, but he also knows that clean salvation doesn't come from there.
Outside the network, inside the noise
The other big target of REM. PHASE it's the world outside. Or perhaps it would be better to say: the world around.
In Networkwith Sick Lukethe album opens a very clear fissure: Leon Faun feels out of alignment with a system made up of accesses, poses, hype, clones, stage names that become heavy crowns and an idea of success that is increasingly similar to a trap.
Here there is not only the usual criticism of the market. That would be too simple. The point is more uncomfortable: Leon Faun seems to wonder how much of that noise got inside him. How much venom, how much competition, how much performance anxiety, how much need to prove something have ended up distorting even the way we look at ourselves.
In Gunpowder this tension is even more physical. The writing seems to proceed in spurts, as if each image were a stroke. There is emptiness, there is breakdown, there is the hunger not to be crushed, but also the awareness of having been stopped, wounded, perhaps changed.
And it is there that the album finds one of its truest parts: when it stops defending itself only with the imagination and lets a clearer fragility pass through.
The writing runs, stumbles, sometimes overflows
The writing of Leon Faun remains one of its most recognizable characteristics. It's rap, but not only. It is pop imagery, fantasy, cinema, anger, slang, confession, interior theatre.
Sometimes it works precisely because it doesn't stand still. The images arrive one on top of the other, as if the head couldn't choose what to save first: a memory, a joke, a vision, a wound, a reference, a threat, a declaration of love said while everything burns.
The limit, when it exists, is the strength itself: REM. PHASE every now and then he accumulates so many images that he risks losing the center. Not all passages have the same clarity and in some moments the flow seems to want to prove too much.
But it would also be unfair to ask Leon Faun for a polished record. His writing lives on excess, on friction, on words that don't want to line up politely. When he tries to order himself too much, he loses something. But when he accepts chaos, he comes closer.
The return of Leon Faun is a crooked realization
The most successful part of REM. PHASE it lies precisely in the way in which he holds the artistic and personal return together without turning them into an “I'm reborn” pose.
There is no final light that fixes everything. There is rather an unstable, intermittent light, which every now and then makes the cracks visible better.
Leon Faun he seems to go back into his own imagination not to repeat it, but to understand what is left of it after the years, the expectations, the money, the market, the exposure, the fear of no longer feeling anything.
The album often talks about dreams, but its focus is not on dreaming. It's waking up enough to understand that some things can no longer be told as before.
And this is where REM. PHASE finds its meaning: it does not close the circle, it does not pacify, it does not give definitive answers. It leaves you in that uncomfortable place between sleeping and waking, when everything is still confusing, but at least you understand that something has moved.
Maybe it's not the awakening yet.
But it is the exact moment when the darkness begins to lose power.
Better songs: Gunpowder, Network, Splitting, Dark melody, Last seconds, Rem phase
Vote: Seven thirty ✰✰✰✰✰✰✰½
Full tracklist:
- Gunpowder
- Sayonara
- Mon amour
- Two Hours
- Network feat. Sick Luke
- Split
- Dark melody
- The awakening
- Nothing from the Wild West
- Deaths of love
- Last seconds
- Rem. phase
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
