VELVET THUNDER

War is casting its dark shadow over Europe again, as the twenties of this century seem to echo the interwar years, when another world war was looming. Today Ukraine is ablaze from daily Russian attacks, while Europe stands divided on how to position itself in this conflict that often seems like the herald of a far bigger catastrophe to come.

For his musical project ROME, Jerome Reuter chose the fate of Europe as his main subject matter to wrestle with. Since 2005, Reuter has written many songs and concept albums focusing on key moments in European history and which reflect and comment on its myths and narratives. With the artist’s desinvolture, ROME deconstructs historical events and ideologemes in order to analyse them from various perspectives, and only to return them as questions to the listener. Reuter oscillates between a half-angry, half-melancholic witness and participant, from whose individual-objective viewpoint all things are inevitably charged with pathos. ROME invites us to observe, discern and shudder, but also to be reborn and shine anew, to ‘walk in brightest black’.

Reuter’s songwriting can often be likened to a journey on which individual impressions mix with personal encounters and conversations. As if one is reading in a diary after a turbulent day, in which one’s experiences are reflected upon and poured into iconic metaphors. Civitas Solis is expressly not to be taken as one of ROME’s many concept album that we have come to appreciate: recordings on which Reuter fully immersed himself into the respective period and its complex conflicts, whilst coming out the other end.

Jerome Reuter is a searcher on the less-trodden and winding paths of history, driven by a longing for Europe – the myth and the utopia – between enlightened manifesto and irrational fortress. As the central metaphor on this present release, Reuter uses ‘Civitas Solis’, the city of the sun as taken from the Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella’s utopian novel from 1602, which imagines the economic and political structure of an ideal state – one of the first social utopias. In ROME’s universe, where both traditionalist and anarchist leitmotifs and connotations abound, this model can be read in a rather ambivalent way.

Stylistically, ROME uses an impressively broad musical variety on Civitas Solis; from chansons in the singer-songwriter vein of Jacques Brel, Leonard Cohen and Townes van Zandt, to cold Dark Wave-type accentuated acoustic guitar elements: An alternating bath of martial hymns and introspective ballads evoking key moments in the band’s 20-year history, and which – as all ROME releases – raises questions. Provocative questions: What does the future hold? And what will it mean for Europe? All we can do is brace for what lies ahead, while we are ‘standing on the Western Wall’, as ‘men against time’ witnessing the storm.

Also set for release in April from ROME are the compilation album Anthology 2016-2025 and The Dublin Session II, a companion to the earlier Dublin Session release recorded in a studio in rural Ireland, and featuring a definite Gaelic influence on the ususl ROME sound. All three albums are set for release on 25 April via Trisol Music Group.