SSIEGE have struck our non-linear world again with Meteora, the follow-up to the breathtaking 2019 cassette release Fading Summer, on Youth. Its elusiveness might be its biggest strength. Indicating a genre is a lost cause. Any description locating it safely inside well-defined boundaries falls flat. Neither analogue or digital, neither old or contemporary, these 5 tracks evoke an androgynous world that is at once open and veiled. A place where presence and absence and weightlessness and gravity are simultaneous. Bathing in colorful light, this record is like a slightly melancholic dream able to usher in a new day or soundtrack the last rays of sunlight.
Artwork – Marta Marinotti
Design – Alessandro Burelli
Guitar – Alessandro Burelli, Michele Latini
Guitar, Piano, Backing Vocals – Giulio Benedetti
Mastered by – Wouter Brandenburg
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Review
Fizzing with nostalgic goodness, Ssiege’s follow-up to the cherished ‘Fading Summer’ album is kissed with a similar sort of brittly blissed serenity and melancholic appeal
Marking his debut with Knekelhuis, the five tracks on ‘Meteora’ join the dots between romantic ‘80s synth soundtracks, the kind of emotive post-industrial explored by Caroline K, and the eternally effective wooze of BoC or Bochum Welt, but articulated with a personalised melodic voice that really speaks to us, and maybe you, on this one.
Equally sharply poised between its precision tooled machine drum patterns and lissom arps, Siege injects a beautifully warm spirit to the album with a grasp of extended melody that wraps the record up in ribbons. On ‘Il Re Delle Mandorie’ he slips us into daydreamy reveries with searching arp leads and lilting guitar that sounds like Vini Reilly reworking BoC’s take on ‘Poppy Seed’ by Slag Boom Van Loom, and ‘Nebbia Spugnia’ shares a gorgeous sort of shoegaze-meets-sad rap air with the recent Sharp Veins album. ‘Il Peso’ follows to the EP’s slowest, brooding point recalling a desiccated adjunct to Pye Corner Audio, while the title tune shores up in witch house interzones like some Salem cut that could have feasibly appeared in 0PN’s soundtrack for ‘Uncut Gems’, or even one of the most aching moments on Made’s ‘Untitled’ album (which was crafted with vintage Æ synths.)
Boomkat