LVTVM – Irrational Numbers
LVTVM – Irrational Numbers
Cave Canem DIY / Controcanti Produzioni / Drown Within Records / Vollmer Industries / Zero Produzioni
Release Date: 19/09/22
Running Time: 25:15
Review by Dark Juan
8/10
Greetings, dear fiends. A recently completed 96 hour working week has consigned your correspondent to the sofa in Dark Juan Terrace for the foreseeable future, so if you are wishing to have any virgins corrupted or places of worship despoiled, you’re temporarily on your own. I’m too fucked to do anything else. Anyway, it’s about time you lot bloody well did something on your own initiative. I shall inform my legions when I am able to muster the energy to raise my corpulent carcass from said sofa again in due course. I can’t even be arsed to go and get myself a beer and I can’t dispatch Mrs Dark Juan to get one either, as she’s copped for the COVID for the second or third time and she’s weaker than a day old kitten and shivering on the other sofa in a state of some disapprobation and annoyance, mainly because Dark Juan has worked constantly and yet successfully dodged contagion throughout the pandemic and she hasn’t. She’s a little bit grumpy…
So, what’s an exhausted and worryingly sober ersatz rock hack to do when he’s sprawled in his Third Invocation Robes (Autumn Weight) upon the Sofa Of Eternal Exhaustion? Well, he does what he normally does and reaches for the cans and his trusty pooter and has a look at the increasingly extensive review list he has to tackle, because there is a veritable smorgasbord of magnificent music out there at the moment and Dark Juan is like a kid in a sweet shop and a bull in a china shop simultaneously (imagine the mess that a sugar-fuelled half-ton of beef could do to your porcelain. This is why Dark Juan has not had many girlfriends) when the new review list updates come out (my scramble for the latest Gothminister album was frankly ungentlemanly and the otherwise excellent Rick Eaglestone was threatened with much violence if he got there first…)
Not that this has a damned thing to do with Tuscan progmeisters LVTVM, whose latest offering “Irrational Numbers” is currently caressing my poor abused lugholes. Now, LVTVM are not your normally kitted out band. They eschew the guitar in favour of two bassists, a drummer and a synth player. This makes for a most unusual sound as two basslines interplay and complement each other, most obviously on ‘Ouroboros’ and ‘Speculum’, both pieces having a strong Jazz bent as well as a large and obvious Stoner component. Imagine Royal Blood and Death From Above having had a romantic night with Tool and King Crimson. When you’ve finished fantasizing about Toyah and her bouncing bazongas because you’ve been thinking about Robert Fripp, as I had mentioned King Crimson and your mind is instantly transported back to those mad COVID videos they kept posting (or is that just me?) I should like to point out that LVTVM play long, blissed out pieces that stretch your imagination into sunlit vistas of possibility. Or that could be the shitload of psilocybin I have ingested in an effort to work out just what the inside of my head looks like. It turns out that I might have psychological problems. Who would have guessed?
Opening with ‘Holswege’, being the term (literally translated as “wood-ways”) the philosopher Martin Heidegger employed to describe how humans perceive reality, LVTVM serve the listener a choppy, syncopated song that ebbs and flows nicely, and heavily modified bass solos mournfully over a thumping second bass line as the 3⁄4 time signature introduces a surprisingly jumpy and skittish element to the whole piece. ‘Hic Sunt Leones’ (“Here Are Lions”, normally employed at the end of maps where unexplored areas are in Roman times and a precursor to our own English “Here be dragons”) is the next tune on the record and is a surprisingly cheerful affair, imbued with a sense of fascination and exploration which is expressed through heavily modified bass sounds and twin solos in different octaves while the synth and drums form a solid, reliable background, yet even they roam freely around the composition and change tempo and time signature almost at their own whim, giving the whole tune a free-ranging exploratory vibe that’s as refreshing as it is complex.
‘Oscillator’ is the next composition, and it is one where the band have clearly been tampering with the equipment that normally feeds them their psychedelics and they’ve accidentally upped the dosage – ‘Oscillator’ melds super-trippy Hammond organ, ambient music and rumbling, phased bassline with Jazz and madness. Basses fade in and out of the song on counterbeats and the tempos wildly vary between Metal insanity and Ambient trippiness.
The production on this record is superb, especially for a band with two bassists, with everything being crystal clear and sharper than an Irish Catholic nun’s tongue, but especially pleasing is the sound of snare and bass drum, the former being punchy as fuck and the second being surprisingly resonant throughout – normally you’d just hear the dull thud of the bass drum being struck, but on this album you can hear the drum reverberate and it’s all a bit wonderful. The snare drum sounds like a snare drum should too, with the correct rasp and not like someone is twatting a brick wall with a recently deceased child.
My favourite piece on this instrumental five track treat is ‘Speculum’ – a sprawling, expansive beast of a song where phased basses and 80’s analogue synths converge in a magnificently overblown, neon-soaked trip to the stars to gaze at gloriously-lit galaxies from the passenger compartment of a lavishly equipped space cruiser. The more you listen, the more the song expands within your consciousness.
In conclusion then – LVTVM are a fearsomely intelligent and forward-thinking band who can truly be described as Progressive as their music deliberately defies convention or genre. The problem is that it leaves me slightly cold, as if LVTVM are too clever for their own good and that grooviness has been traded for absolute mastery of their instruments. The record sometimes has a kind of overpowering knowledgeability that is not entirely welcome when you’re just trying to be cosmically enhanced, but this is a minor blot on the copybook of these egregiously talented Italians.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (Il sistema brevettato di valutazione degli schizzi di sangue di Dark Juan) is conflicted because it is impressed with the absolute skill of the musicians in LVTVM and loves the tunes, but they aren’t very Metal and they are too clever for their own good on occasion. 8/10 and a definite recommendation for the Prog fans out there…
TRACKLISTING:
01. Holswege
02. Hic Sunt Leones
03. Oscillator
04. Ouroboros
05. Speculum
LINE-UP:
Carlo Bellucci – Bass
Isacco Bellini – Bass
Alessandro Marchionni – Drums
Mike Marchionni – Synths
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.