(written by Islander)
Today the Romanian/UK band Clouds are releasing their sixth album, Desprins, and we’re helping spread the word by sharing the premiere of the entire record.
From “Disguise” through “The Fall of Hearts,” Desprins includes seven new songs, plus two bonus tracks — “Sorrowbound” and “Chasing Ghosts,” which were released as stand-alone singles in 2022 and 2023, respectively. The band describe the album as “a fearsome journey into the darkness of consciousness, an introspective reflection upon the human existence.”
The lyrics of the new songs are poetic, which is what we’ve come to expect from songwriter Daniel Neagoe. As we have also come to expect, they are expressions of the crushing disappointments, pain, and hollowness of life (“this mockery of hope”) — dark reflections filled with acrimony, loss, regret, and the realization of delusion. Insanity and rage also mark the narrator’s bleak memorials, but not joy or hopefulness; life has extinguished those.
Daniel‘s vocal rendering of the words in the songs of Clouds has become one of the group’s hallmarks, and they are again here. When people attempt to descriptively capture the depth of voices such as his, we often resort to metaphors and allusions drawn from deep places in the natural and man-made world — caverns and canyons, ocean trenches and crypts — but the massive reverberations of his harrowing, abyssal roars don’t seem earthly.
Those aren’t the only means of vocal expression deployed in the songs. They also include singing — singing that sounds bereft, even wretchedly so, and deeply haunted — as well as soulful, brokenhearted vocal harmonies that soar, and words uttered in broken gasps.
The music is of a piece with the words, a union that bands sometimes don’t achieve when the lyricist is a different person from those who write the music. Of course, in Clouds it’s the same person, though of course he has talented collaborators who help authentically translate his bitter and disconsolate reflections into the sensations and moods of the music.
Authenticity is an important concept in assessing Desprins. The songs reveal an apparent attention to details, a careful craftsmanship for the purpose of expressing what was intended and achieving a communion with listeners who have been in these same emotional places, or eventually will be there (because that seems inevitable).
Those details create moments of elegance and poignancy, including piano, flute, and string melodies that are beautifully sorrowing. On the other side of the scale are dense swarms of abrasion, huge bombing chords that stomp and jolt, and spine-shaking drum blows. In between, synths ascend and sweep across the sonic heavens, creating wonder, and guitar-leads cry out in grieving agonies (as does the flute).
The sonic contrasts are ever-present. On the heaviness scale, the music sometimes sounds cataclysmic (especially when Clouds accelerate the pace), a reminder of the way that life can be ravaged by catastrophe and ultimately always ended forever, or sometimes as manifestations of the rage that such ravages can produce. But even within or immediately after such cataclysms, the lighter instruments surface, expressing other moods, including loneliness, wistfulness, yearning, and despair.
The ebb and flow of the intensities and moods across the songs creates an intertwining of spell-binding and shattering sensations, of touching pathos and earth-shaking upheavals. You might find yourselves lost in somber thought one moment, and then immediately feel like the gates of your body are being savagely assaulted by battering rams, and won’t withstand them.
In all its phases, both soft and loud, gentle and hard, Desprins is emotionally powerful, a wrestling with life’s unforgiving plagues that’s gripping, and I think won’t soon be forgotten.
Clouds are offering Desprins on CD and digital formats, with a shirt: