Video Premiere: Oblivion – Blessed Child Opera (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

After a six-year hiatus, many have been eagerly awaiting the return of Paolo Messere’s mercurial, musical brainchild, Blessed Child Opera, and so the announcement of a new album, Red Flags, slated for 21st March, has certainly set tongues wagging in many of the more discerning quarters of the music world.

Ahead of that long-player release, he offers us “Oblivion” as a teaser and tester of musical waters, and it is everything you hoped it would be.

“Oblivion” is a song built around a sense of longing; the music seems formed less from the usual structures and melodies and more as if he had found a way of turning emotion and an emploring feeling into sound. Instead of drifting along, it crawls towards the listener, a sense of longing held together by slashes of raw guitar and spirals of post-punk sonics, brooding beats, unrequited feelings, and pathos-drenched lyrics.

Adding to the feelings of upheaval and untethered emotion, the video, a collection of dark, fractured landscapes and glimpses of vistas racing past a train window, only adds to the sense of transience and imbalance set up by the music, convincing us the listener, that we too are in free-fall, lost and alone and subject to forces way beyond our control.

Paolo Messere has hardly been idle since the last album made under this moniker, having released the double album Masculine/Feminine as Ostara’s Bless, and two albums as The Big Self, but it is the return to the Blessed Child Opera name that people have been looking forward to. Well, the wait was worth it, but the wait is over.

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