It feels like a lifetime ago that The Icarus Line exploded into the scene with the Alex Newport-produced ‘Mono’, And UK debut single ‘Feed A Cat To Your Cobra’ – perhaps because it pretty much was. Who could have predicted that the band would last 17 years and 6 albums, and that their front man, Joe Cardamone would still be not only active but very active and still treading new ground some 20 years on?
Because it’s spring 2021, and as the title suggests, ‘Quarentina’ is a lockdown album. While crafting a pair of follow up albums to his solo debut, ‘Holy War’ in 2020, the world stopped and the 'Quarentina' project emerged in response – and it’s more than just an album, but the soundtrack to a series of short films documenting life in lockdown in LA.
As is something of an emerging characteristic of works created during lockdown, ‘Quarentina’ is an album born out of necessity, and one which has a real sense of urgency and immediacy. Creatives – at least when not paralysed by the crushing emptiness of life in the pandemic – tend to create out of a compulsion, a restlessness that means they simply have to create or otherwise they’ll die. Thrown in a break-up and you’ve got the recipe for an intense period of reflection documented in unmediated, uncompromising fashion.
The album’s 20 tracks are all short, fragmentary, the majority being around the two-minute mark or even less, sketches of life from the artist’s perspective at that moment in time. The lyrics veer between brooding, mournfulness, and angst, and Cardamone captures his emotion-driven musings against minimal backdrops of soft swathes of organic-sounding synth sounds.
‘Nine of Swords’ finds Joe in full theatrical mode, vocally sounding very Mark Almond as he emotes over dramatic strings, while the dark, drawling ‘Crushed Skull’ is downbeat, downtown, and seedy. There are hints of resentment and reckoning to ‘Yeshua’, which also sees the arrival of drum machines marking out sparse beats and Cardamone going a bit Prince. ‘Dec Piano’ is an aching instrumental post-rock elegy, while the shrill shrieking of ‘The Tower’ is uncomfortable, sonically: there are plenty of other moments that are uncomfortable more generally: it feels like being in a room with not so much a friend but an acquaintance having a bit of meltdown. But that emotional rawness is what resonates and makes this sparse, understated album so impactful.
