MOROSE

La mia ragazza mi ha lasciato

CD, Cane Andaluso Recording / Ouzel

Today is the first day of November, the day after Helloween (which I don’t celebrate), and as every year it is a cold and grey day. The smell of winter is in the air and looking out my window everything looks dead. But there is a source of warmth in my room that warms me better than any radiator or oven – it is the new CD by Morose. Like reading a collection of heartfelt short stories on a winter night, the three musicians of Morose plus various guests travel through twelve chapters, from elegic lo-fi-pop to orchestral songs of epic proportions with some almost alt.country-ones in between. The mood is melancholic and pensive, like being sad in a good way. Because life is like that in autumn and winter, there is so much silence and room for thinking about what happened through the warmer months. Even the music is low, because you don’t want to wake up anyone still sleeping in the room next door.

Take, for example the song, “worse than a soap opera”: it starts off with a minor string on a cello and the singer states: “I’m just a country-boy – I can’t understand / how you could hold tight two different persons’ hands”. What a devastating blow emotionally to the narrator, but captured in two simple and easy sentences. And when he starts to realise how bad he had been dealt with, of, course thoughts of murder stumble into his mind and spread like a dark fog around every thought, but he can’t do it, because: “Put your t-shirt back on – I won’t pull the trigger / But I’m not Henry Miller – I’m not Henry Miller.” Actually, it was Willam Burroughs who shot his wife, but that is not what he is getting at. Henry Miller always was completely consequent and 100 percent true in all his feelings and emotions. And realizing the trap he is in, the bad cards life has dealt him, the singer starts the ending lines, which are sung in a heartbreaking chorus over and over again: “Life is worse than a soap opera”. I don’t think Spiritualized or The Doves could do it any better, and they couldn’t do it with that little production. What would happen, if Morose were able to get ahold of a really big production budget?

One more thought on that last line: I have experienced a lot of troubles in relationships in my circle of friends, that whatever I see in soap operas seems like easy going and completely unrealistic to me. Life writes fates much worse than any tv-director would ever dare to show on the screen. There are men falling in love with married women, who don’t know if they should leave their husbands or not, so everything stays in hiatus for months without end. There are fathers crashing with helicopters and pregnant women throwing their husbands out of the flat because they don’t fell loved enough anymore, or whatever. All these things can make me go out of my mind. And all of that I find in that one little song, that one little line. That is great art, isn’t it.

After “worse than a soap opera”, “la mia ragazza mia ha lasciato” – which means “my girlfriend has left me in italian by the way – slips into an instrumental which goes from lonely street fieldrecordings into a singing saw. Then there will be Leonard Cohen-like blues songs, some harmonicas, hints at swing and jazz, but all of it clothed in a fine accoustic atmosphere of one guitar, silent drums and bass. My personal highlight, though it is hard to chose, is “a lovely waitress” – a country-soaked song about beer and loneliness that is much closer to Hank Williams (“There is a tear in my beer”) than to Belle & Sebastian (“Dear catastrophe waitress”). You might also find a hint of the “whiskey bar song” by The Doors (can’t remember the correct title now and I am not able to find my doors-CD) included traditional country-instruments, get a surprise. The lyrics are also as close to the originals as a young man from Italy can ever manage to get.

Next off on the album are more modern songs, one instrumental that mixes again street-noise with harmonies and then more melancholic songs that reminds me of Yume Bitsu in their modernity or Midnight Choir in ther elegic sadness. “la mia ragazza…” closes off with a choir of friends singing “don’t you wake up in the morning, just go on dreaming and don’t wake up at all” to a fine melody that will stick in your ear. As far as closing records goes, this is as good as “Death is not the end” on Nick Cave’s “Murder Ballads”, “Last Train to Mercy” on The Walkabouts “Scavenger” or “In the long still night” on Gallon Drunks masterpiece of the same title. (I’d like to mention “we’ll meet again” on Johnny Cash’s last album “the man comes around – American Recordings IV” as the best closing song of a record ever and in hindsight I don’t think there will ever be a moment on any record as emotionally tearing for me as this one. Moreover, to compare anyone to Johnny Cash comes as close to sacrilege as an atheist like me could come to.)