Artoffact Records – 1st April 2022
Christopher Nosnibor
It’s an auspicious date to release an album, perhaps, but there is absolutely nothing jovial, mirthsome, or bantery about this new offering from GGGOLDDD, as the accompanying notes to ‘the band’s most ambitious and masterful work to date’ explain: This Shame Should Not Be Mine was conceived in the silence of 2020’s pandemic lockdown, partly as a way for GGGOLDDD lead singer Milena Eva to confront parts of her past and partly in response to the Roadburn Festival’s invitation to propose a commissioned piece for its 2021 online edition. As Milena expands, ‘While the album tells the story of my personal experience with sexual assault, the most recent song ‘Notes On How To Trust’ is about learning how to trust again after such trauma. When every boundary is blurry and every person you meet is a possible risk, it’s a challenge to keep sane.’
I’ve purposefully avoided other reviews so as to prevent the risk of them colouring my own, and also, and not least of all, because I’m acutely aware of how easy it is to applaud the bravery of tackling such a difficult personal subject in song, and even more so to place that traumatic experience at the very front and centre of an album in such a direct, uncompromising way. But perhaps bravery isn’t what this is about: more that This Shame Should Not Be Mine is a work of compulsion, and an essential part of processing. It’s not uncommon for writers and musicians to place their innermost throughs on paper, and it’s absolutely not about attention seeking. It’s simply the only way to make sense of things, and once on paper, those horrors are somehow neutralised in some way: as if by seeing the words on the page, it’s no longer ‘yours’ so much as something that simply ‘is’. There’s no doubt a substantial body of writing on the psychology of this that I haven’t discovered, but that’s for another time and another forum.
Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s a lot of anger channelled through This Shame Should Not Be Mine. It’s directed both inwards and out, and it manifests in both the lyrics and vocal delivery, and is matched by the music, with sharp blasts of raging noise. Elsewhere, we find immense power chords blasting into the abyss, post-rock / post-metal crescendos surging skyward, not in exultation but in surrender and cathartic escape.
‘I Wish I was a Wild Thing with a Simple Heart’ pitches Minela’s almost blank, crystalline vocal against a low, monotonous thrum that builds and bursts into a multi-layered, multifaceted bloom with all shades of extraneous noise and torment crashing into the climax to the most nightmarish effect. There’s something palpable in the anxiety of those final seconds that see something of grace and elegance tear apart in an instant.
Minela escorts the listener through an internal monologue that finds her replaying the scene over and over from different angles, different perspectives, different emotional standpoints.
‘I wanted to be loved / like everybody else / I wanted to be beautiful’ she sings wistfully at the start of ‘Strawberry Supper’. On ‘Spring’, she sings in a steely tone, ‘I want the smell to leave me / I want to shower till my skin comes off / I didn’t see it coming / I didn’t think that I would be this quiet’. ‘I should not let it define me in any way / but it’s easier said than done’. Through these reflections, the picture builds in its fullness. But this is not for our benefit: it is not an explanation, a justification. We are simply being granted access. ‘Comfort comes from the weirdest places’, she muses on ‘Invisible’ which warps into MBV-like shoegaze then stammers with machine-gun-like drumming into a more techno passage. If the music and its extreme dynamics strike as bordering on schizophrenic, it’s entirely appropriate in the way it follows the unpredictable swings in mood and perspective. And yet it all fits and flows perfectly: for all the angst, for all the channelling, for all the raw emotion, This Shame Should Not Be Mine is an outstanding album, and outstanding because it has truly outstanding songs. Every one is simply breathtaking in its power and intensity. The aching fragility of the slow-burning piano-led ‘I Won’t Let You Down’ simply leaves you stunned. The aforementioned ‘Notes on How to Trust’ calls to mind Cranes, but in collision with Nine Inch Nails and Daughters. It’s beautiful, majestic, but also painful and desolate. The title track, sparse, minimal, is so incredibly potent, as Milena finally delivers the conclusion that ‘This shame should not be mine’. It’s powerful, and her delivery sends a shiver down the spine.
An emotional and sonic rollercoaster, This Shame Should Not Be Mine is one hell of an album: hard-hitting on every level, it’s one best absorbed while sitting down and with a large vodka to steady the nerves.
AA
Aural Aggravation 