WL//WH Album Review THIS IS THE BRIDGE
This Is The Bridge Portrait
On February 19, Belfast-based Tonn Recordings released the striking new album “World Without End” by the London-based act This Is the Bridge. This record includes 11 ‘memorial anthems’ on the modern dying world or 11 narrations about the world’s Tenebrae. It is like dancing ecstatically on such music cynically describing the situation in this unfortunate world of mankind.
“World Without End” LP is a beautifully ironic album and it is created and designed by one of the UK’s most prolific and important presences in British synth today. Τhat synth kind which origins from the early dawn of Dystopia and all the way through the ‘fret and worried’ soul of its composer, the infinitely talented This Is The Bridge. This one is not any computer puzzle music but a rather cinematic Eraserhead-meets-Pi(π) artifact by all means. Proto/Primitive, Minimal synth-punk together with all the waves from Albion’s coldwave horizon and with a good and strong dose from the inner denouncements of the Darkwave and the nice wicked dances of post-punk; this is a totally imposing album.
I was looking to find something that would push me deeper into TITB‘s psyche and I found it on the official Tonn Recordings website, in the field with interviews Ι read (and I copy it here):
Mary McIntyre (TONN):
What have been the greatest influences in the development of This Is The Bridge’s sound?
Richard (TITB):
Creatively speaking……. my love of music. Recalling the very real fear of nuclear war. Childhood. Memories. The 1970s. A teacher playing the class Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave when I was eight. Hearing OMD’s ‘Messages’ on the local radio in Liverpool the same year (and being transfixed). Quatermass. A love of abstraction. The 1980s. The impact of Thatcherism on the UK and on my family. Hearing the opening moments of ‘Exercise One’ when I bought Joy Division’s ‘Still’ compilation LP and first put it on the turntable (that bassline!)…Post-Punk. The Rite of Spring. Science Fiction. Oxygene. British Television. Disco. The experience of art school. Mars – The Bringer of War. Gary Numan. Michael Nyman. History. Feelings of inferiority. Electro House. Killing Joke. Andrei Tarkovsky. Iain M Banks. Xmal Deutschland. A nation living in the past. The 1990s. Asimov. Atheism. The Fall. Clockwork Orange. Depression. Sinfonia Antarctica. Blackadder. The Young Ones.
With a lot of things clear now in his music (and a handful more to inevitably come) This Is The Bridge nails you with the apparent simplicity of his music and amazes you with the whole complexity of his orchestrations. I don’t know if he is having the time of his life while and when creating a new album but it all sounds as clear as it can be; creation is vital to him, no music/no air! Only that now the air he breathes made him design his most intense work so far. We need such records. We can dance to the artificial morbidity of our times, we need to laugh at it as we won’t die with this paradox world. So, do we need balance and disorder? None, or both?
From 2016 onwards, This Is The Bridge has released 8 long plays (!!!), most of them via TONN, and it seems that his music is his own dialect to communicate with the world. He is not any new trendy destructive or a lustful punkster, he is not any other ‘prophet’ too. Ηe seems to me like describing his thoughts with music, and damn, these thoughts are the same as the whole world’s but he at least looks at the mirror too. What else can I say about this record? What else can I write to make you feel how significant is it? Don’t you get it? This is not only the new music by TITB, this is also Your music and Mine!
Keep Up With This Is The Bridge:
Written by Loud Cities’ Mike
