My Personal Murderer: Looking out of closet with skeletons
The language of music is able to convey more than anything else that ineffable completeness and integrity of the senses, which the personality wants to express in relation to being. The meaning become lost in the words and only the sound has the opportunity to relay thoughts and feelings which are beyond for the mouth and even for the voice of reason. Those who want to hear such a confession must be prepared for the fact that this music won’t entertain or solace.
Odessa-based band My Personal Murderer, choosing for their creative work one of the most combined with the music themes, the theme of melancholy, which forever marked their sound with atmosphere and depressive. Their third album "Cauchemar", according to the leader Yevgen chebotarenko, is a conceptual record: all tracks are united by one theme and inseparable from each other.
The album’s sound is like its cover: dark, spotted by fuzzy characters, raises its hands in the air from despair or from the phantom hope. Each song is different from the other: they have a place for a lengthy spoken word ("Cauchemar"), rhythmic bass and drums, striving to culmination in the form of violent screaming ("Soup For the Creature"), viscous melody, which resembles the sound of Lake Of Tears and Manic Street Preachers ("Crawling Son"), dynamic motive with its catchy cutting riffs ("The Warm Prince").
Lyrically, the album is very personal, the musicians were trying to achieve the maximum possible intimacy in their texts. Listening resembles an existential voyeurism. Another thing is that symbols overload is close to graphomania. It’s very difficult to clearly communicate through images of words.
"Cauchemar" is a painfully gloomy release. Yes, the sources of the band’s inspiration of are guessable, yes, the lyrics is overloaded by symbols, and the music does not always match its deliberate depth, however, despite all the "but", My Personal Murderer created an attractive in its imperfection album, which could become something more, and this sense of otherness forces you to put it on repeat again.
Reviewed by Alexander Tverdokhleb
Translated from Russian by Anastezia