What to do when the ropes of the night keep you firmly chained to the darkness, hindering your every movement, making it impossible to break free? There is only one option. You have to generate your own light.
This, in short, is what I read from the combination of band name and cover design for the debut album Impossible Space by Ropes of Night, a new band from Cologne, Germany.
The band, it seems, followed their own advice: Impossible Space was crafted and recorded during the first wave of the modern plague, thus battling all the fear, the uncertainties and restrictions it brought.
One thing you realize already with the very first run-through of the album is that the band might be new, but the actors involved are old hands at music making. The stringency and consistency uphold in soundscapes and atmosphere require a clear, agreed-upon vision, which leaves no time, no space for ego trips and getting lost in details. Furthermore, experience, discipline, skill and, last but not least, equipment are required to compose and record an entire album in a matter of months. All things newcomers to music might struggle with.
A bit of research soon confirms the first impression. Ropes of Night were founded by Ralph Schmidt, the creative mind behind Ultha, an established black/death metal band the readers of these pages might well be familiar with. Apart from Ralph, Ultha’s drummer Manuel is also involved in the new project, as is another band member, Andy Rosczyk, who did the recording, mixing and mastering for Impossible Space. The remaining two members of the quartet that is Ropes of Night, vocalist and bassist Tom, and guitarist Martin, are also veterans of the underground music scene, I read.
The music on Impossible Space is built on early eighties European and American post punk and darkwave, with an added pinch of goth rock. Fans of Joy Division and The Mission will undoubtedly find the sound familiar and to their liking, but so will fans of younger bands like Soft Kill or Rope Sect. The ambience is certainly recognizable: melancholic and cold, is leans towards the darkness, but the well-crafted melodiousness of the songs prevents the mood from ever crossing into depressive territory. Clean sung, well-written, introspective lyrics, with stories somewhere between The Sorrows of Young Werther and Grimm’s Tales, “about the heart, about how much sadness a soul can endure and how incredibly brave the human spirit can be” complete the picture. Among the album’s nine gloomy tracks Vanishing is my favourite, featuring a seemingly impossible combination of depressive lyrics and a sing-along chorus, all embedded in a pulsing, hectic rhythm.
If you’d like to explore this a bit further, the beautiful video to Another Closing Door is a good address. Shot, directed and edited by Ivan K. Maras, it shows in black-and-white pictures “the overwhelming beauty, solitude and gloom of a sleeping city in the grip of the global pandemic”.
Impossible Space by Ropes of Night is a well-written, well-produced piece of music of a melancholic, dark shade, that does not forsake melody or beauty, thus preserving a glimmer of hope, a light. Recommended.
(8/10 Slavica)
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