LONG DISTANCE CALLING: How Do We Want To Live? (ALTERNATIVE ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

For their seventh album, Long Distance Calling wanted to ask an existential and devilishly contemporary question: How do we want to live? While one could imagine that the question is asked to stigmatize how we interact with Earth and nature, it is more on the human side that the Germans ask it: does our relationship to machines, the permanent technological race and the imbalance between scientific discoveries and their humanitarian use, lead our civilization to its loss?

It's not easy to answer this question with an almost exclusively instrumental music (only one song 'Beyond Your Limits' that shines more with its solo and its break without words than with its verses and refrains). Let's see how the inventive German quartet does. The use of samples and narrative effects is a technique that LDC has already experimented and they use it again to lay the foundations for the debate on the diptych 'Curiosity'. The shadow of Vangelis and Blade Runner hovers over this futuristic introduction. The rapid arrival of LDC's recognizable heavy post rock launches the track but it is quickly tinged with a floydian prog, halfway between 'One Of These Days' and 'Comfortable Numb'.

The musical themes follow one another with great fluidity, as usual, alternating heavy riffs, aerial solos, delicate arpeggios or slow hypnotic progressions. This is the Germans' art of offering great variety while maintaining a link between themes and pieces. 'Hazard', for example, offers a light pop between Muse and The Police with no less than seven different themes and a solo of great melodic and epic force, all animated by an natural fluidity. The same can be said of 'Voices', which comes straight out of Joseph Kosinski's Tron Legacy (2010) and borrows its exotic sounds from world music before the guitars set a heady and hypnotic riff that evolves with every couple of bars into a new development even more exciting than the previous one.

Six-string lovers will get their money's worth. We counted no less than 30 different guitar tones on the album, a variety that borrows from prog its richest composition codes and that the band is working on to follow with an evidence as natural as it is insolent. The numerous listenings will reveal a number of subtle arrangements at each new playing. Only 'Fail: Opportunity' could put off those allergic to the Game Of Throne cello, which fans will love. Finally, a word on the closer 'Ashes', a kind of hypnotic and haunting trip-hop, whose intro is based on Hugo Weaving's (a.k.a. Agent Smith) tirade during Morpheus' interrogation in Matrix, "You are the plague and we are the cure", which ends up plunging the listener into doubt about the answer to the initial question.

How Do We Want To Live? The genius of the Germans is to let the listener answer this rhetorical question himself by giving him some food for thought. The immersion in a universe impregnated with the concept is a feat that the band masters and magnifies on this opus. A nod to SF cinema, electro elements, and futuristic atmospheres are distilled to dive the listener into their world and push them to question themselves and try to answer it. The album has a wealth of composition and arrangements out of the ordinary which promises a permanent listening pleasure. When Long Distance Calling masters his subject, he takes the challenge with brio, again. - Official website

LONG DISTANCE CALLING

HOW DO WE WANT TO LIVE?

INSIDEOUT MUSIC

ALTERNATIVE ROCK