Dark Matter Rhapsody – We Remember The Fire (Single Review)

‘We Remember The Fire’ is a single from the album, The Painter of Invisible Colors by Dark Matter Rhapsody (DMR), a progressive rock collective fronted by Rex Narratus.

To understand the song better, one might have to listen to the whole album. Beth Isbell reviewed the album, finding the single ‘groundbreaking’, and also finding female voices weaving ‘through the composition in conversational and sung passages’.

DMR themselves do a great job at distilling what their music is all about. Their press material speaks of how ‘We Remember The Fire’ features ‘layered drums’ and ‘shimmering synths’.

The song’s vocals are dynamic. Female humming starts the song. From the humming, comes in the elongated word ‘step’. It comes out more as ‘steeeeep’! From the wordless, we are transported to something familiar. From ‘step’, we get ‘strike’. The humming and then the elongation of ‘step’ and ‘strike’ give the song its lethargic feel – at least on this part.

There’s more humming, the beat rising, followed by the chanting of ‘we remember the fire’ – which goes on for about five or six times.  Suddenly the song has gained more agency, and the chants are energetically delivered in quick succession.

Then for about four lines, we experience a subtle change in vocalisation: we go from chants to what might be speechlike melody. Delivered as if uttering a couple of words, but melodic at the same time, we hear:

‘Ash in the air

Dust on the skin

Heat in our bones

It begins again’

Again ,the vocalisation changes when we get the line, ‘Do you feel it?’. Skip a line, and you get the question, ‘What do you burn for?’ – a direct question. The beat’s low here.

The song answers its own question: ‘The ones yet to come’. The beat rises again,  and the answers are delivered in melodic vocals. Then there’s the quick vocalisation of short lyrics, which go like:

‘We rise… we fall… we circle it all

We burn… we cry… and still we call

We dance in the dark, out feet are flame

The fire knew us. We know its name’

Of course, there’s some rhyming going on there. But the last two lines are poetic, if not fantastic in the sense of surrealism. The fire knowing them is a case of personification (fires do not have the ability to know).

But it’s not only the fire that’s remembered on this song: sound and rhythm are also remembered.

SCORE/Good: ‘We Remember The Fire’ shows that DMR knows how to sing. They can move from one dynamic to another with ease. From their press material, I take it they wanted to create a sound you might hear at a tribal ceremony. If we judge them on that score, then I think they’ve done an outstanding job. However, from a perspective of music as pure entertainment or unbridled singing, I think having to move from one dynamic to another more than once kills the enjoyment of the music.

Instagram
Facebook
Visit website