KENN NARDI – Dancing With the Past

The power of music is such that it constitutes an art that lives through time, is enjoyed at and goes away as it passes by. Despite the static nature of figurative arts, the combination of tones and melodies can reveal its completeness only when it’s situated in the time frame, when it is created and then perishes. Music’s power is therefore its ability to revive again and again and become eternal (which is a paradox) as opposed to our mortal existence which inevitably comes to an end. The music lives on eternally and changes over time (another paradox) because the sense and feelings, the load of emotions it brings is subject to a new perception, new lights and shades depending on the day, the hour and the moment music is listened to. Adding up the listener’s subjectivity, there is an obvious difference between listening to music and looking at a painting on the wall; the painting contains the same frozen images, same colours, and same sun. And while there is certain similarity, the difference is evident: the image in front of me draws back memories and the image that is born inside of me takes me back in time and I become part of a memory or float in the realm of illusions.

Much as the above statement is outside the scope and purposes of a standard metal album review, it does fully apply to the album in question, because it outgrows the standards: KENN NARDI’s Dancing With the Past. What part of the past it contains and what part of the music takes us back in time. It is not an album you could comprehend in a few spins – there are 28 songs in a CD with total timing of over two and a half hours. A piece of music clocking half the duration of a classical symphony. Each of the 28 songs has its own pattern and own power. A variety of melodies and solos, acoustic elements, piano, violin, extreme vocals (Fragile) switching to clean singing (Dead Letters), soloing bass lines (Symbiotic, the instrumental Lament in Rust), a beginning with a musical-impressive expression (The Dark and the Light, The Scarlet Letter), epic start and a classic metal sound (Untouchable), riffing full of pathos (Blinding Lies), thrash riffs, all of these co-existing in an incredible symbiosis. Here we have music that makes us, sleepy caressing us in its silk embrace, carrying us through the infinity of dreams and bringing us back to reality outlining its rough face, rather grotesque at times. I am not trying to make any analogy or senseless comparisons, even to the band Kenn Nardi once rise to fame with – Anacrusis. This solo project by the name of KENN NARDI gives us the opportunity to enjoy a brand new material served in a brand new way. You simply set aside everything, press play and let the music guide you through, dancing and flirting with the past or at least the times when “progressive” metal was not considered mainstream and commercial, for stadium selling-out bands playing blunt and boring music. Progressive metal is not supposed to be a counterpoint to the underground scene and some extreme metal bands could be labeled “progressive” to some extent just because this term became an absolute cliche nowadays. Be calm, though, as there are no cliches in Dancing With the Past. It is full of analogies, musical imagery, diversity of melodies carrying the experience of time and paying tribute to past. The past which is relentlessly taken away, the past whose jigsaw puzzle could be solved at least partially in our minds by a “dance” with eternity (timelessness).

9/10