Monolith Cocktail Blog

SINGLE  REVIEW

Once again our most recent addition Ayfer Simms, lays it on with another adroit, lyrical, literary review; entertaining the brand new single from Greek psych blues rockers, Cyanna Mercury.

Cyanna Mercury   ‘Ode To An Absent Father’   Available Now

Spyreas Sid and the band Cyanna Mercury are the Greek Nosferatu, the Erebos, god of darkness and shadow, the father of things crawling in the basement of the Acropolis and entering the stage with a devilish alto-voice proposal. The “ode of the absent father” starts with a church-like organ, and leads us with boosted guitars to the dark and twisted mind of a demonic figure offering fatherhood, a dangerous proposal from which there will be no return. The music’s metallic edge, a softer version of System Of A Down, is honorably balanced with a melodic oriental vocal that welcomes you in the forsaken father’s fragile world: After two thirds of the track, the all-powerful creature of the darkness is suddenly the victim of his own desires and falls in a plaintive desperate howl where the absent one becomes another: the daughter remains silent and leaves the disowned father to his own “angel-less” world amid perturbing whispers and vibrating hellish psychedelic guitar in the background. By the end of that track, the strong figure is crippled down unable to quench his hunger pangs and left “feeling lost” in his doomed temple. The shift of the demon’s personality is left unexplained, we do wish more hints about what brought on such despair, however the track manages to pleasantly transport us into a world of melodic and controlled rage.

This track, “close to the album’s concept” is likely to figure in the soon to be released vinyl album, but will leave out the single’s B-side, ‘Dirty Things’: a track that “works great live” says the vocalist. Indeed that is probably a good decision as Dirty Things has the allure of a big classical rock piece: we imagine a man with a distorted mouth playing confidently on a giant sweaty stage and swinging the instruments with disheveled arm movement to a relaxed and enthusiastic crowd, far from the broody dangerously vulnerable father figure of the other side which we want to know more of.