Sangre De Muerdago – ‘Noite’
(Sick Man Getting Sick Records / Neuropa Records / Música Máxica, 2018)
Deep in the woods of Galicia there is a place where goblins live. It’s true, although no one has seen them. These goblins make music, music that can show us what (or where) the truth we are looking for is. Of course I’m talking about a Pablo C. Ursusson’s project: Sangre De Muerdago.
In their latest CD with the title ‘Noite‘ (means “Night”) we hear their familiar sound, their haunted melodies, with the escort of sad but optimistic vocals. As in all their records so far, you can see how vocals and music become one, but still you can see their uniqueness.
For me, ‘Noite‘ is a record that takes human feelings and transforms them into music. In these 12 songs, you can see your life in a way you had never seen before. You can see you’re hiding secrets, but above all, you can see your truth. You can feel yourself travelling towards you. Of course S.D.M. doesn’t claim that we might like the truth, they claim that the journey will be interesting. And this journey is!
From the first song ‘Medianoite‘ we start to float into this ‘Noite‘. The opener is an instrumental song, a prologue to all the best things (tracks) to come.
This is just the start of this inner trip, a trip to the dark forest or to the dark corners of our own selves. Even in their previous records I had this same feeling. I knew that, even back then, their music was to me something like magic, or mystery stories from a forest somewhere in the world, or …close to home.
The second song ‘Xuramento‘ could easily speak for a lost love, a love that we’ll never forget, even if that love was only in our mind and never in our reality.
But as life has its brightest moments, so does ‘Noite‘. Songs like ‘Roubando o Viño do Fauno‘, ‘Lume de Solsticio‘ and ‘Mariñeiros‘ with their powerful music take us to a place where intense colors and the bright sun prevail. All these tracks are instrumental, but we can add the lyrics we like as we stand in this sunny place.
In the rest of the tracks, we see their familiar ritual folk, this atmospheric feeling which is produced by sad violas and flutes (amongst others), the exotic sound of the guitar with the soft sound of harp and the vocals of the forest fairies singing their chants.
The last track of the album (‘O Amor‘) is an epic close, where vocals and music stand as one in the beginning of the track, just to leave later vocals have their place in the music, just to leave us with bittersweet feelings, but full of hope.
Of course I understand S.D.M. music is something subjective, but —at the end of the day— what is music? Music is the sound of us, of what we are, of what we ever wanted to be. Comparing this album with their previous full-length ‘O Camiño das Mans Valeiras‘, I can see that their journey continues. We don’t know when it’s going to end; we only know that we can let ourselves join them, because life after all is a fairytale, a S.D.M. fairytale of goblins in a dark forest somewhere.
Konstantinos Pamfiliss
