For their first album in over a decade, Mediavolo has given us a gift that teaches the value of temperance. Seasoned listeners will feel at home, as many of these songs have long-lost sisters in past albums. Away Within, for instance, with its keen observation, “Being a fraud is our work,” recalls central themes explored throughout 2006’s A Secret Sound, even starting to answer questions posed therein (one giant step closer as we are to knowing “How Does It End?”). Now, there is an added layer of life experience: a sign of the times for a time of signs. We hear it in the dreamy guitars of Walk Out, which flow like memories we learn to question as having ever been real. In their place, we account for the scars left behind when hope was torn from our chests. In Made It So Far, we find ourselves in a cab going nowhere, taking comfort in the illusion of letting someone else do the driving, if only for a spell. The refrain “What would I do that for?” is a rhetorical question to which an answer would be a knife to the thigh. As the guitars culminate in self-immolation, it is the desperate counterpart to the catharsis more gently laid out in “Latent” (on 2011’s Modern Cause), cut short by the crash of regret. And in Unbidden Truth, we encounter shades of “To The Eye” (from 2008’s Unaltered Empire), wherein the magic of perspective speaks of how fragile we are in the grander scheme of things.
 
The allure of Mediavolo is that even newcomers will feel a touch of the familiar, as if these sounds have been lurking within all along and only needed amplification like an ASMR tingle to announce their awakening. And the only technology one needs to access them is woven organically into the inner ear. In the spiderwebbed keyboards of Rage and the neuronal disconnects of I Really Do Wonder, we feel the struggle of facing words we cannot understand. The babble of life reveals a crack in its foundation that is too far gone to fix; the whole tower must be demolished and rebuilt.
 
Despite a whimsical undercurrent in songs like Happy That Way, one of two sung by Jacques, so much of this album is about severance, so that professions like “You wrapped around me is what I need / To keep believing” come across as bittersweet reflections hanging their hats on coatracks of shadow. This is nowhere truer than in Moving Out, which feels at once like a breakup song and a eulogy for anyone who knows the sting of loss in any shape or form. With just enough melancholy to feel alive, it sets down vain beliefs on the altar of recourse, seeking for a doorway into something brighter. By the time Disembodied Vision turns the mirror of technology on its creators with such profound indictments as “A.I. is just, now, the proper healer: Rise of a man infallible,” we can only scramble in search of the chalices we’ve already emptied into the mouths of our creations.
 
Still, it’s never just about the egotism of the individual; it’s also about the larger relationships we forget when living by the book of hedonism. Merry Old Lies calls out this hypocrisy with honesty, reminding us that the open embrace of commerce is built by those who have forgotten what an open embrace feels like. These are the contradictions we allow, the harmful choices we swear by, only to realize too late that we’ve gotten stuck in the machinery between flesh and soul. Meanwhile, all we can do is expect the worst while praying for the best.
 
This album stands its ground as a testimony to the fact that all of us have been “away within” to some extent since 2020, navigating the cruelties and discoveries of isolation in a world yearning for community. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that the only way to escape loneliness is to retreat further into it. And so, let this music be a call to action for the wayward soldiers who have already exchanged their weapons for the body heat of those never forced to fight.

Tyran Grillo
ecmreviews.com