Wasted Wine: “Perpetual Spirals of Power & Pleasure”

[twitter style=”vertical” float=”left”] [fbshare type=”button”] [google_plusone size=”standard” annotation=”none” language=”English (UK)”] Is this music? Is it cinema or cabaret? Or are we at the local opera house? Well quite frankly, it’s all of those things.

Wasted Wine are a band of creative spirits who work their trade at 360° degrees. They are deliciously wicked and talented craftsmen who do not simply write conventional music, but more appropriately sculpture and forge it into aural cabaret pieces. “Perpetual Spirals of Power & Pleasure”, is the band’s fifth album.

The album opens with “Perpetual Spirals,” an effulgent and macabre musical adaption, featuring intimate and arid vocal interchanges, accompanied by an elusive vibrato string arrangement and a music box sounding tone which could so easily have been played by horror movie director, John Carpenter. The track’s effectiveness is highly depended on it’s atmospheric ambiance which is so skillfully crafted by the band.

“10th Of October” and “Her Brother, He Gave Me Some Words To Remember” takes the band beyond it’s Southern Carolina borders, and into a myriad of influences. Drawing from their Eastern-European inspired melodies and use of Middle Eastern instruments. The band develop a 10-minute musical opus, filled with colorful textures, tempestuous moods and varied time signatures. Gowan’s sinister and grouchy vocal tonality is a perfect foil for the poignant modulation rendered by Murphy. If you could imagine Patti Smith and Tom Waits duetting, you could almost certainly start to hear what I’m talking about…now throw in a pinch of a hallucinatory Jim Morrison…

Wasted Wine stand miles above traditonal pop music forms and even though they may also use simple consolidated rock riffs and rythyms, as in the song “White As Snow” for example. They cannot be fully appraised and appreciated, using the same listening criteria as one would on the common 3-and-a-half-minute pop song.

Track after track, you get the sensation that the album resembles a dark muddy pit of quicksand that draws and drags you in slowly, but steadily.

The start of each new song is precise and decidedly evident, yet each subsequent ending seems to misteriously fade into oblivion, transforming itself into the following song almost indistinctly. A recurring sensation that had me restarting each track more than once, after apparently missing the introduction. Apparently…

On “Perpetual Spirals of Power & Pleasure”, Wasted Wine deal out their picturesque storytelling and bravado role-playing, in the best of Troubador traditions. To individually analyse each track and song, would be a total injustice to this consumate work of eclectic art. Like separating and critizing each single frame taken from an epic movie. It is only when you have witnessed the complete works set before you, that you are able to fully grasp the magnitude and intention of it’s content. And so be it, with “”Perpetual Spirals of Power & Pleasure”.

Save to say that without a doubt, on “Perpetual Spirals of Power & Pleasure”, Wasted Wine present 11 tracks that are certain to capture the imagination of anybody with  the slightest craving for an album not produced to the common vagaries of commerce.

Wasted Wine have produced an album that blatantly and overtly depicts compassion, anger, sorrow, humour and obsession in it’s most grotesque forms. All within a recorded project that has not succumbed to compromise or trepidation of any kind whatsoever.

The album itself, is a bold statement from this South Carolina band, amidst the almost total commercial drudgery offered by their contemporaries and peers alike.

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