Dan Shea, one of the members of the missed Vukovar released last year on October, the 7th (just on my birthday) a new album, entitled Snowcrush, almost as his current project. Previously he had already delivered in 2021 twelve songs under the title of A Frightened Man in addition to having created the project Neurotic Wreck with which he recorded an album. Snowcrush the work that occupies us today, continues on the one hand the mourning for the death of Simon Morris, which, if you remember well, was the central axis of the last Vukovar‘s albums and on the other hand tries to cope with having suffered a sexual assault.
Snowcrush is an extremely lo-fi album in which we can imagine Dan Shea locked in his room, recording it in one take, without worrying about mistakes and looking only for the most immediate honesty.
Vukovar was always a box of surprises, and this album is no less so. Snowcrush starts with the intro “Wisdom” with a solemn beginning that ends up mutating into disturbing electronica. Then comes the rage of “Poz Top”, a kind of very lo-fi noise rock. In “Cowardice”, we find Dan solo on guitar with a more confessional folk vibe, until the guitar bursts with violence, without fear of feedback, and looking for the honesty of the first take. “The Mirror Jury” sounds a bit more like Vukovar at least the vocals. We never quite got to know how the peculiar band divided the roles, but with this work by Dan Shea we managed to get an idea of his contribution. “My Darkest Star” could indeed fit on an album by his previous band, as it contains that sort of post-industrial melancholy that we could enjoy in the past, and is one of the highlights of the album. “Blood Lust” somehow reminds me of The Velvet Undergrouind’s “The Gift” as Dan recites over a background of distortion. The album continues with a delicate interlude called “Shattered”. Instead, we find more harsh guitars and distortion on “Build My gallows High” with Dan doing a haunting second voice. “Angel Key” is another interlude, this time noise-based and the album ends with “Professional Anhedoniac”. This composition, which deals with the theme of suicide, begins with the guitar and the noises covering the voice but mutates to become a more conventional song before ending again in the noisiest possible way.
