Forget the Colours

Garden Wall… What musical style could possibly hide behind this name? Several options immediately spring to mind:

1)doom/sludge (“wall: concrete, cement, steam-roller, heaviness- boom!”); possible

2)romantic gothic/dark wave (“garden: flowers, beauty, fragrance, roses, etc.”); possible

3)progressive (“Garden Wall: that sounds philosophical and a bit abstract. Could be some progressive with a psychedelic vibe ala more recent Mastodon…”); possible.

So, which of these highly educated guesses could be the closest to the truth? Answer; the latter, but excluding the “psychedelic” tag. This Italian formation is surely one of the most original and inventive acts on the music circuit for the past 20 years… by a looong shot. They started venturing into the progressive genre with a more linear epic/symphonic delivery, sounding like a less exuberant and less dynamic Dream Theater, on their first two albums; but comes “The Seduction of Madness” (1995), and things take a radical turn towards much more complex, thoughtful, “seductive” and ambitious fields.

The band weave their elaborate tapestries in a fairly inimitable fashion which at least on the aforementioned album don’t go beyond the 6-min mark except for the gigantic 16-min saga “Noia”. But enters “Chimica” two years later, and we now have the longest opener in music history: the 35-min hallucinogenic extravaganza “Chemotaxis” which now shows an obvious fascination with King Crimson’s indigestible puzzles. A 5-year break follows, by all means intended as a healing period for the “diseased” fans giving them a time to recover from their indigestion problems; followed by the impossible to forget “Forget the Colours”…

The latter album is the definitive Garden Wall release, with each composition being a long (6-9min on average) sprawling epic of weird time and tempo-changes, oddball riffage, and some of the most unorthodox song-structures ever encountered on the scene. The main difference from the previous two efforts is the bolder venture into thrash territory the latter only hinted at on a few isolated cuts in the past. The opener “Lead” is a twisted thrashterpiece which seamlessly combines Mekong Delta, Realm and Deathrow this head-spinning “cocktail” surrounded by surreal balladic passages; beautiful, but pretty engaging stuff. “Hatred” is mostly more flexible doom with loads of atmosphere, before “Anniversary” adds more to the confusion with hard aggressive, super-technical riffage. After “Bisturi” the listener will have no chance, but to be completely sold, this number being the ultimate experience in psychedelic bizarre thrash full of offbeat head-scratching riffs creeping from all sides creating a macabre atmosphere which is slightly dissipated by the funky escapisms on “Deinococcus Radiodurans”.

The aggressive, very technical, thrashisms carry on with “Obsession” which is “marred” by an overlong ambient interlude. No such gimmicks on the best possible companion piece to a quiet white Christmas Eve, logically titled “Christmas Eve”, which is a sinister, relatively straight-forward, thrasher which gives way for the entrance of two epic 8-min opuses: “Negation of Becoming”, a hectic hypnotic doomster; and “Dragon Slayer” which is nothing like the soaring “eagle fly free” hymns of the 90’s power/speed metal movement, an illusion created by the song-title: this is discordant, quite abstract, progressive metal with atonal guitars and meandering, not easy to follow, rhythms which close this album in a fairly puzzling manner.

This is a very individualistic approach to metal which is hard to be compared to the one of any other outfit, and what’s more admirable is that it has been sustained for a long string of albums without sounding trite and boring even for a split second. It’s true that progressive metal offers a pretty wide palette to choose from, but this is probably the least predictable repertoire on the scene steadfastly coming out of the hands of exactly the same musicians by at the same time providing an endless array of new ideas and original decisions. Certainly, there’ll be a group of fans who will jump out the window after barely two songs having already been turned into raving lunatics (“What the fuck is that?!”), and music of the kind will never be in the spotlight, not even within the progressive metal circles; this is a difficult, time (and probably nerve)-consuming listening journey, but for the right ears it offers pleasures at literally every corner, more or less expected. It takes dedication to sit through the very long compositions where at times a quiet moment seems like lasting for ages, but one already knows that the twisted perplexing shreds are just a note or two away, and they would be by all means worth the wait…

The Italian bizarros kind of stretched too far on “Assurdo” (2011) which is an “absurd”, albeit still listenable and strangely alluring, amalgam of styles among which metal doesn’t play the leading role anymore; this is eclectic music with strong baroque, chamber overtones which will evoke nostalgic memories of their compatriots Goblin and the 1970’s Italian horror film soundtracks; and will also recall the progressive doom innovators, also from Italy (from where else?!), Black Hole. Some brilliant eccentric riffage appears out of the blue here and there, and raises the hopes high that this unnerving operatic, ambient saga will finally come to an end… but no; these remain randomly scattered “oases” in a musical “desert” which may turn into another Sahara if the guys decide to carry in this direction...

Back to 2002: One would by all means have problems forgetting the colours of this “garden wall” surrounding nine forget-me-nots which, to pick them all, one has to spend over an hour touring. Some would be pulled off immediately after merely touching the first one, but the true “flower” lovers will carry on unperturbed, all the way to the successful completion of this “voyage” to remember.