Ultrashiver by The Secret Meeting

…Try to rearrange things

I can see a strange place

Because a picture tells a thousand words..
Am I Here, The Secret Meeting

So, needless to say I’ve been hooked on the incredible fusion of styles that Collide weaves together on their past releases, otherwise I wouldn’t have pre-ordered Ultrashiver. kaRIN and Statik of Collide have teamed up with musician Dean Garcia of Curve to produce the line-up named ‘The Secret Meeting,’ and I’ve got the album right here. I fully expected to love it, and I am not disappointed. This is gothic music without the self-indulgence and I’ve been a fan of Statik and kaRIN for years, their release Vortex from 2005 cinched it for me. That albums massive amount of tracks across a two disk compilation still stays in heavy rotation on my hard drive. And I just love the overall aesthetic that Noiseplus Studios appears determined to inject into the music industry as it brings a much needed sense of soul to the gothic/electro/industrial genre as a whole, so I fully expected this side project to be a complex and engaging composition.

I close my eyes and see shit like this when I’m listening to these tunes like some sort of a light show for a surrealist world filled with a timeless madness. Honestly, this album is a soundscape for daydreams. I find myself more and more zoned out in thought through to the last track, ‘Imaginate…’ It’s hard to review an album I like so much, that flows so smoothly from track to track. It’s a wash of sound, full and compelling yet never intrusive, never jarring. Psychedelicly transcendent, is how I’d sum up the overall tone of the album, the surrealist landscape conjured by the album artwork and the joyful shivers the musical depth brings forth in tracks like ‘Shiver X’ and ‘Every Little Thing.’

The Secret Meeting album Ultrashiver is by no means an album of throw-away tracks that didn’t make it into a Collide project. Instead there’s a complex and underlying statement within some strangely beautiful dream realm, some surrealist vision painted with the lyrics that warp and weave between the collage of artwork and the arrangement of the tracks.

The songs can all be sampled on thesecretmeeting.net, you can hear both ‘Am I Here?’ and ‘Every Little Thing’ on the myspace page, and I recommend getting the album now while the sales at the website are up. This shit will change your perspective and feed your head. The Secret Meeting emerges from a musical landscape populated by acts like Theater of Tragedy, Switchblade Symphony, Delirium, or Portishead, and fans of those line-ups would quickly find Collide and this side project takes up the slack where those acts leave off.

I did expect Dean Garcia to create dramatic dance riffs against kaRIN’s high and haunting vocals and Statik’s noise manipulation, something expressed most directly in the track ‘Beautiful Noise Machine,’ but what I didn’t expect was a paean to superhero powers (‘Shooting Laser Beams’). I do dig the guitar work from Rogerio Silva and Scott Landes that’s woven into a couple of tracks, and with this all woven against the haunting artwork by Teodoru Badiu that makes up the album and the site flash come together to create a very potent little experience.