Divisions of Decency - Scarlet Soho
Divisions of Decency, the debut album from Winchester's
monochrome synth-pop warriors Scarlet Soho, is all hard edges, stylised
sounds and sharply defined lines. Synths soar over tight, squalling
guitars and the clipped sounds of a drum machine, with detached, coldly
emotional vocals completing the picture. Scarlet Soho manage to pack
a lot of noise into sparse-sounding
arrangement to create a tight, claustrophobic and threatening sound.
Divisions. is an album which invites the listener to read between the
lines. The vocals are cryptic, begging interpretation, and the melodies
too have a
sense of things left unsaid. There's a sadness in the music, with the
contrast of scratchy, pointed guitars against sweeping, cold synthesiser
combining to produce something mechanical and yet somehow aching. That
ache
is buried under layers of sound, a subtext rather than something explicit,
but it's very definitely there. And it's there that the impact of this
album lies; in the sense of loss and distance, of depersonalised hurt
and pain.
Scarlet Soho are a band of vicarious kicks from the news at night,
a cold observer sitting back and watching the battle unfold. Divisions.
is a disinterested, once-removed commentary on our disinterested, once
removed culture of emotional scavengers. It's a clicking, mechanical
metronome
counting out the seconds of an empty adrenaline rush; the sadness of
cities and the desperate faceless speed of modern life. A half hearted
taunting, a hopeless anger and loss. Scarlet Soho never actually come
out and say that their social commentary is a manifestation of something
desperately sad, but they don't really need to. If a straightforward
telling of the state of affairs becomes a tale of something sad, that
sadness will come across in the telling. And so Scarlet Soho's music
packs a paradoxical deadpan ache, from the cold vicious jab of its opening
bars to the soft sweep of synth in final track City Behaviour. It's
edgy, frantic, powerful stuff, which manages to be incredibly self-aware
without sinking into hideous self-parody and which packs tunes and punch
aplenty.
Holl(i)y
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