If the term Shoegaze has always suggested intricate walls of guitar noise whilst Dream-pop suggestive of a more drifting and hazy soundscape, then it is where those two genres meet, merge and meld that Submotile operate. A strange world where solidity and structure are drenched in half-heard lyrical delivery and fluid, formless riffs, where music seems at once cavernous and chaotic yet ambient and textured. It’s a strange counterpoint, it is here that opposites seem not only to attract but also fall in love with each other and have strange sonic offspring which exhibit the best traits of both their parents.
Right from the start the music comes at you in deft and disorientating waves, Alba being the sonic salvo which tells you everything that you need to know about the journey which you are about to embark on, noisy, chiming, shimmering and aggressive. But it isn’t all as confrontational as that might suggest, Tramonto offering up some quirky, agitated indie-pop moments and Eastern Sky Sundown mixes tribal dance beats with a wonderful post-punk urgency.
3am Reveries offers some less abrasive respite, merging the jangling grooves of perhaps The Stone Roses, had they gone a less commercial way, with My Bloody Valentine‘s formless majesty and Winter Storm Sequence is a gorgeous cocoon of blissed out pop-rock sounds and floating sonic textures which ebb and flow between minimal beauty and searing, sky-scraping grandeur.
Fans of immersive music will love this, like the aforementioned MBV it is more about feeling than form, the music seems to hang in the air rather than groove to a pre-set pattern, less songs more sonic statements and if that sounds pretentious its just because it is hard to write about such cinematic and wide-screen brilliance without slipping into hyperbole. Sometimes the usual go-to words are just not up to the job, this is certainly one of those times.
