Faster, but slower (The obsolete music of The Sick Man of Europe)

It was April 16th of this year when The Sick Man of Europe detonated the first single destined to be part of the debut album of the same name: Obsolete, a song that immediately attracted the attention of listeners and magazines that float in the orbit of indie/alternative music.
A Mr. nobody, hidden in the shadow of the pseudonym The Sick Man of Europe, coming from London, produced by the label The Leaf Label, this and very little else is given to know about this artist.
In our world made of hyper-exposure he has decided to return to stimulate the curiosity of the public in the oldest and most powerful way ever…hiding.

A few months earlier a 3-track EP had been released, Moderate air Quality, which went unnoticed by most, but already containing part of those atmospheres that we find, in fact, in his first album and that clearly refer to the best dark and danceable post-punk of Anglo-Saxon origin that you can remember.
Who is The Sick Man of Europe? How old is he? Does he play alone? Does he have a band? Does he just sing or does he use the instruments himself? You can see a guitar in the few images available online, you can see arms on the covers of the first singles and very little else, while on the album cover his face stands out, half flooded with blinding white and half immersed in a very deep black of Bauhausian memory. After all, from the first note of the aforementioned Obsolete and immediately after, to the first beats of the pressing drum machine, you are catapulted into a river of memories that intersect, turn, swirl in your brain together with the robotic voice you hear and that makes you feel programmed for obsolescence, like any electronic device, ready to be useless in a few years. There is no hope in the music of The Sick Man of Europe, how could a seriously ill man have it? Years ago there was a boy who screamed “Rape Me”, rape me, make me feel alive, now, instead, we are exactly on the other side, no furious and adolescent anger, what the sick man requires is to be retired, put aside, made obsolete “Retire me, make me obsolete”.
The music of The Sick Man of Europe is not new at all (is there anything new in this world?), you see him covered in blood while he still feasts on the limbs of the corpses of all the groups you have always liked, laid out there, in front of your eyes: Joy Division, NEU!, Kraftwerk DEVO, Bauhaus and The Sounds, to stay on the surface.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the second single Transactional recalls an assonance in the title with a certain Transmission and is absolutely digital and cold in its refrain “I’m afraid, I’m here”, just like Digital by Joy Division was and just as the video that accompanies the song is digital: a screen split in two the whole time, in which, under the light of red and white strobes, on the left he dances and on the right  she dances (who could she be?).
And yet in the programmed and cold music, full of synths, of clinical rhythms, simple and syncopated (see Acidity Regulator), with guitars and basses that chase and cross each other, on scales of a childish simplicity you can hear a personality, you can understand that the person who is speaking to you with that cold and resigned voice is doing it with your own dictionary, in fact he has eaten the whole fucking book and now he is finally ready to vomit everything that comes from his stomach.
In David Lynch's Lost Highway, for those who were lucky enough to see it, the protagonist at a certain point no longer recognizes his wife and tells her "It was you. It looked like you. But it wasn’t you" and the same can be perceived in almost every song on this album, even in Profane Not Profound (third single) the presence of the most famous Mancunian band hovers and you even hear it mentioned in the sound of the spray that accompanies the beat (remember She's Lost Control?), you feel at home, it seems like the song from before, or rather it always seems like the same song, but then everything else starts, in this case two notes of a guitar and all that mix of sounds that create a familiar and at the same time alienating atmosphere. What can I say, he's good The Sick Man of Europe has his own modus operandi, he has character, he catch you on the hook from the very first bars, his album was born as a classic and now the most complex thing for him is to move forward, hoping that this does not become, as it was for Interpol Turn on the Bright Lights, a weight too heavy to carry.
I conclude by pointing out Sanguine the longest track (about 9 minutes) and probably the densest of the album and recommending listening and re-listening to Movement: close the windows, turn off all the lights, turn up the volume and let yourself be carried away, dance - dance - dance, as the genius of Martin Hannett said faster, but slower!

by Ron Rocket