contron - Where the flowers grow (contron is dead) (self-released)

★★★★★ 1 reviewsWrite a review

---

Score 202 vote up down
Meta: 199.15238095238

---

---

[▶]Listen to the release

---

Edit this album

Here we are, to talk about Contron's newest release, "contron - where the flowers grow (contron is dead)", which is currently available as a pay-whatcha-want download from the artist.



Due to some uninteresting changes in my giant corporate email provider's policies, it happened that my mail client lagged a lot and I got, purely luckily, the news only today, a nice notification from yesterday, Contron has a new release !



Checking this particular mailbox, for which I suspected somehow a failure, was the kind of thing I do when I got absolutely nothing else to do, like, say, just now, at 3am in the middle of the night.



And now the download is about to complete, and I have to write about Contron, no matter about what time it is, Contron, who is, to me, the major artist over the past few years, since I discovered his first recordings back in 2012, and then I passionately followed all the story. A rich, colorful story, indeed.



Contron uses to sing with a incredibly pleasant acoustic guitar, to sing (with a slightly detuned backing vox line, quite often) about a strange universe that is, to me, of an incredible poetic quality, talking about friends, pills, sometimes girlfriends, and what is surrounding all this is just a very accurate vision of how hard to live and how empty can be the XXIth century's ordinary human's life, even if you are lucky enough to be in a relatively safe place of the world... It reminds me a lot about my (r)urban life & youth, just, you know, the roads, the cars, the small shops, and the definitive feeling of not being at all adequate to the world.



And now the download's finished, let's unzip and press play...



Or, wait, just before I still have to add that I'm a bit curious... And, let's say it, anxious, about what will be this release. I had noticed a few weeks before, when I saw that there's now a CD pack available "From me 2 U" for sale on his page... It's indicated "from the artist formerly known as contron" and this sounded a bit strange, and, maybe, somehow creepy, when you are following greedily whatever an artist can produce and someday he's "formerly known"... What happened ? I was a bit bothering... And now a release entitled "contron is dead".



Well, life ain't always easy, let's face the monster... I press play and...



white noise, more present that at any time before... Guitar notes, of a delicate grace, and immediately the voice, and... It's like being struck by a lighting, but spawned over a few seconds, the whole fragility of this construction, the feeling that emanate from it is just too much, you just can't cope with this...



And then the album really starts... And it's different from before, quite different from before. It's always in the style that the artist used to practice, that style like no other that he created for himself, but... It's just like if Contron had quit a part of his humanity, becoming some kind of etherized, pure soul, talking directly to you, to what you are at the deepest level, and it hurts. This album is not for the average people's needs, I have to say. It hurts.



Developing slowly but surely to more and more killer tunes, it will just chew you then spit the bones. With a perfect, totally suiting the album's mood lofi production, Contron lays his genially written guitar arrangements... After a while, I finally became able to put words about what was unclearly emerging as a semi thought in my mind... All what I have to say, is, we got some kind of nowadays' Robert Johnson here.



Well you know, I don't think that wall be remembered a century and a half away from us will be what is currently on TVs and radios. And if one album for the half of the 010's has a ticket to retain the attention of humanity for longer than a summer season, it may be this 'where the flowers grows'. That's my conclusion.



And I realize at this time that I've been listening to the album in random mode. For your information, the track that initially put me into pieces when I pressed play was "the marks", the fifth one.