Leap Of Faith

Spiral Of Silence - Leap [CD ENE 044 ITA 1998 FLAC]

Quite a long time ago (March 2011 to be precise), I wrote this.....

I'll admit that I know very little about Spiral Of Silence. Our good friend, Google, tells us they are The Belgian Joy Division. Errr ...not a good tag in my book!

Oh.... so that means cold wave or dark wave or call it what you like as long as it's a wave. I know that I can be cruel about some Belgian bands from the eighties, but I suppose we have to blame what was pop music from that era in mainland Europe, and our gloomy Mancunian friends for heading over to the low countries. I grew up with Manchester music, I don't need to hear it with a foreign accent.

Anyway, Spiral Of Silence were from the nineties (1991 onwards), so when we (well not me) were all in our baggies with floppy fringes, loving naff dance toons and sucking on tiny bits of paper, this lot were churning out some pretty good stuff in their own doomy melancholic way. Some of their lyrics are very very dark but melodically they work for me. The Joy Division tag is very clear, but they have developed the Belgian post-punk sound to add more clarity and melody to cold wave than was there before. Some pieces are much more liken to what Interpol were doing ten years later, but who ever thought Interpol were original? Cue more hate mail!

According to Discogs they released two full studio albums after a succession of tapes. Everything is unavailable and long deleted. Even the usual European resellers have nothing. I got these tracks from a blog follower in Italy (where he says they were quite popular), other blogs link to a "best of" compilation and some early demos but all links are dead. So, if any of you have some of their output, please get in touch and we could put together a full discography.

Firstly I'd like to thank one very generous blog contributor who helped us obtain the two Spiral Of Silence studio albums. I'll start with their debut, Leap which appeared on Italian retro-post-punk-dark-goth label Energeia in 1998, though the tracks were recorded between 1993 and 1997.

The title track begins quietly but intriguingly, breaking out after 57 seconds into that highly familiar, yet infectious sound of powerful bass driven dark post-punk. There is no doubt that Tom Van Troyen's voice get very close to mimicking Ian Curtis, he even quotes Curtis prose on the following Copyright. Gewapende Vrede translates as Armed Peace and is only one of two tracks in their native Flemish/Dutch tongue. If like me, those who pulled down my mp3 files back in 2011 have been waiting to hear She's Like A Suppo in it's full lossless glory.... it's all about that bassline, so simple, yet so effective.

Synths do strings on the atmospheric Connection. A very emotional track where Van Troyen uses the capacity of the spoken word effectively in one of the darkest, anger-filled love songs you will ever likely hear. The Belgian 'Dark Entries' Maagdkanker uses a church organ rather than strings in a Flemish ode to cancer ...or is there a deeper meaning lost somewhere in translation? Beautiful Money and Finally were two of the earlier recordings for Leap, and whilst not the strongest two tracks are a fitting close. The guitar slides on Finally are something else!

This is clearly an album which looks back rather than forward, but there were plenty of bands in the eighties, nineties (and onward) who achieved more recognition with unfortunately less effort in this field than Spiral Of Silence. Perhaps that was the way it was just meant to be....

1 Leap
2 Copyright
3 Gewapende Vrede
4 She's Like A Suppo
5 Connection
6 Maagdkanker
7 Beautiful Money
8 Finally