The thistled blast of “It’s Luxury” is a bloody solid opener, centrifugally strutting its wares — war-painted to the nines, a beautifully measured savagery falling straight into the cratered aftermath of “Instinct”, agonised words to a foetal-like thump soaked in shivery electronics — the damp pessimistic crawl of those murky circuits biting into the emotional sincerity, dialling up the discomfort.
The mood is a dark one, stays unrelenting throughout Camouflage Heart’s nine tracks, the crowing lyrics creating taut and tenebrous cages for the music to ominously shadow. The delicate lullaby / sharpened blade of that unsettling voice thrown to scornful totem — dislocated and spiky, with distorted riffs angrily prising at the metaphorics. The muscled grit of “Under Glass”, its fist-on-door percussives racing the wounded words, twisted up into droning sax.
The arrow-filled rhetoric of “Memories Of Skin And Snow” cut into by a bone-hungry bass, and ascending scars of guitar, all scuzzed-up and skipping to a fevered vortex. This record atmospherically triumphs, the stark obsessives of “The Spirit Behind The Circus Dream” unfurling like an unholy blossom, shimmering on a serrated fret and curling corrosives reflecting the transphobic ugliness of the eighties, and that profiteering Thatcherite stranglehold. Short-term philosophies that fuelled plenty of angst-worthy bands back in the day, of which the early sound of Cindytalk was up there with the best. This was personal pain drifting out universal, stark and unapologetically truthful, tilting with a razored economy that hasn’t lost any of its cathartic punch.The rheumatic ache of “The Ghost Never Smiles” digging firmly beneath your skin, rising into a frustration-whipped exorcism. A meaty insistence that rips straight in there, slipping into the over-saturated shock therapy of “A Second Breath” roasted on crumpled metal. Hot-wired into the scary concentrate that is “Everybody Is Christ”, its decaying ambience mutating into a raspy stigmata-splattered bouquet of stinging nettles and vocal moans, daggered in tunnelling drums and spectred guitar.
Utterly compelling sonics that pearl potently, splash morbidly into the piano pins of “Disintegrate”, hinting echoes of the next album, grasping at a haunting sadness that would be later expanded upon, but for now slowly falling into the expressionist despair of silence. It might be forty years old, but it still remains a brooding masterpiece. Thank you Dais for bringing Camouflage Heart back into the world.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
