Musically speaking, Lone Assembly’s concert was my only real fixture at this year’s m4music Festival; I didn’t wanna miss it. The band’s debut album Knots & Chains, hailing from French-speaking Switzerland, is more than just a noteworthy debut. And the international response seems to bear this out.
If luck is on their side, they’ve laid the groundwork for something big. The ingredients are there, and they demonstrated this impressively during their first performance in Switzerland’s largest city, at the music industry’s most important event.
Janosch Troehler
The small Exil club, packed to its 400-person capacity, was quickly swept away by the expansive, melancholic sound, characterised by Raphaël Bressler’s poignant vocals. As the opening track, The Pain Keeper offered exactly what defines Lone Assembly: dark 80s references with an anthemic quality, a sound that strives for vastness. As mentioned in the review, it sometimes sounds like Editors. But also a bit as if The Killers had wandered into a gothic club. And with that, at least I was already sold straight away.
Perfectly mixed—a minor miracle in Exil club, if you ask me—even the tiniest details came to the fore, and above all, the deep voice wasn’t drowned out by the larger-than-life sound. Even the complex, plodding My Life’s Solid worked surprisingly powerfully on stage as a comparatively leisurely moment.
There stood the quartet, not too many gigs under their belts yet, performing with a passion but also a callousness as if these musicians had never done anything else. As if they were destined for exactly this.
And anyone who already knows Knots & Chains like the back of their hand will hardly be surprised that the relentlessly driving In the Open became the frenetic highlight.
When the final song was announced, I became rather anxious, but then the clear guitar melody that introduces A Dark Score, the undisputed gem of the album, rang out. An anthem that so perfectly combines hope and melancholy, contemplation and optimism. For five and a half minutes, cold shivers ran down my spine in the hot, stuffy club. Wonderful.
Until now, I thought that such hymnal, daring music as that of Lone Assembly had only two options in a cramped little club like the Exil: it either explodes in this pressure cooker like a volcano, or it collapses silently. But there is a third possibility: it expands quite naturally. Not a violent eruption from the confining walls, but a metaphysical diffusion into infinity.
