Nice name. Lots of vowels, a greco-latin taste, and something a bit different from the usual "Destruction of the blood of the sadness from the brotherhood of the streets in your face".
Maeiutica.
Maieutics.
The art of giving birth. Lots of pain, lots of love, lots of dedication and corporal fluids spilled in the way to get lots of joy. That could be a good summary of this EP: it’s violent, it’s harsh, but at the end it turns into a miraculous happiness to listen to it, because of the energy and the sincerity that were put into it.
Maieutics.
The art of giving birth. Lots of pain, lots of love, lots of dedication and corporal fluids spilled in the way to get lots of joy. That could be a good summary of this EP: it’s violent, it’s harsh, but at the end it turns into a miraculous happiness to listen to it, because of the energy and the sincerity that were put into it.
Maieutics is also, and moreover, by extend, the art of giving birth to the truth. Rise After Defeat is not the first nor the last hxc band to risk its riffs and screams in the search of such a vast and unreachable concept. I’m not even sure that hxc is really a good vehicle to embark for that kind of journey. But the way hxc looks for the truth can be full of enseignement about how the truth can be seen.
For some of us, truth can only be written with a capital letter (as you noticed, i’m not part that crew). It’s this monolithic and monochromatic giant totem you either see or deny. In this case, your ignorance will be seriously shaken, and you need to be smacked straight to the face with the truth, just to be sure you won’t miss it when you pass by. Truth is a shiny sharp blade that separates good from evil, light from darkness, believers from mecreants, Maurice Dantec from the rest of the world.
For some of us, truth can only be written with a capital letter (as you noticed, i’m not part that crew). It’s this monolithic and monochromatic giant totem you either see or deny. In this case, your ignorance will be seriously shaken, and you need to be smacked straight to the face with the truth, just to be sure you won’t miss it when you pass by. Truth is a shiny sharp blade that separates good from evil, light from darkness, believers from mecreants, Maurice Dantec from the rest of the world.
For others, truth is an ever-fleeing ghost, neither black, nor white, nor even grey or that kind of dirty beige you can sometimes notice under some english clouds. It’s not solid, not liquid, but it has a flavour and smells like something, but something you can not describe. You will use your own words, everybody will use her/his own words, and the result would be a maelstrom of babelian descriptions nobody would understand, because... because... as Paulo Coelho, Lao Tseu, Vinnie Paz and the Dalai Lama would say: Truth can not be reached because, at the end, it lies within us. Discovering the truth, in this case, would be exploring your self, what remains of your soul. And guess what? That’s exactly what maieutics is about! (in case you were thinking I was getting lost in my own verbiage, pumba!).
Maieutics is a socratic ninja technique to reveal the truth in someone by asking the right questions. It was used by Socrates to massively smash the sophists, and i tis nice to see it recycled by a bunch of tatooed hairy Italians to name their EP. I suppose they choose the name because they feel like belonging to the second kind of truth-seekers, more nuanced, more subtle, more complex.
And if I allow myself to think like that, it is because they sound like that. The 4 songs are built on variations around the passive-agressive alternance between falsely calm short periods and nasty bursts of anger. No square heavily produced bouncing hits for the mosh pit, but a vision of an inner chaos they tried to translate through music. The technical side is neither in the sound, nor in the soli, but was used to create claustrophobic atmospheres and unhealthy songs.
I started to listen to this EP one year ago, and I still can't get tired of it. I admit that it is now so much a part of this last year that I may not be totally objective about it. But music, and especially hxc, is not so much about objectivity than about sincerity. Maieutica was sincerely made, and sincerely love it. Period.
- To listen to it, to download it and to buy it: Rise after Defeat bandcamp
- The official site, with the merch, the tour dates, etc.: Rise after Defeat.Com
You will notice that they released another EP, with once again a very nice name (Pragmatica), and which is as good as Maieutica. So do not hesitate and check it.
Hxc is not about objectivity, but medias still smell better when they offer various sources:
- the usual Hardboiled review
- Asice.net unfortunately did not like it that much
- Metallized, if you read italian (lucky you)
- SoundMagazine, lucky, lucky you...
