Description
For the Love, the Death and the Poetry is the fourth studio album by singer-songwriter and guitarist Nero Kane.
A folk liturgy that oscillates between longings for eternal love, fascination with death and ghostly poetics.
Psychomagic mysticism (As an Angel's Voice), stripped down blues (My Pain Will Come Back to You), apocalyptic drones (Until the Light of Heaven Comes), guitar arpeggios (Mountain of Sin), crepuscolar ballads (There Is No End), shamanic rites (Unto Thee Oh Lord), solemn notes of organ and strings (Receive My Tears), cross gloomy stretches of skeletal American deserts in a dilated, haunting ritual. Echoes of a romantic past (The World Heedless of our Pain), evoke the eternal force of art and love in contrast to the ephemeral vanity of existence, in a redemptive journey through the blinding and dark moorlands of good and evil (Land of Nothing).
Kane's dark folk-tinged vocals and guitars are accompanied by the mellotron and vocals of longtime collaborator and multifaceted artist Samantha Stella, to build a unique and personal style described as cathartic, desert-like, eerie, ritualistic and psychedelic - "A desert procession for the living, in goth-folk style, searching for a belief." American Songwriter USA. References to the apocalyptic folk of Michael Gira/Jarboe/Swans, the gospel spirituality of Nick Cave, the perdition of Johnny Cash, the tragic poems of Nico - evoked in Stella's algid spoken word as pointed out by critics - the visionarity of Jodorowsky and the sick sound of Italian Occult Psychedelia, the latter element especially connoting the live performances defined as captivating, shamanic and unearthly.
Over the years Kane and Stella have performed in Los Angeles, Europe, and the UK, favoring churches, museums and theaters, both as headliners and in support of musicians from the international experimental, dark folk, and goth scene, including Zola Jesus, Jozef Van Wissem, Darkher, Jonathan Hulten,
Hackedepicciotto, Me and That Man, Rome, Hugo Race, and Marissa Nadler. With the recent Temples Tour, they earned a mention among the three best concerts of 2023 by the French magazine New Noise for their performance at the Ex Tenebris Lux Festival in Montpellier. The Holy Shows, between 2024 and 2025, confirm the evocative and graceful resonance of Nero Kane's music.
The debut album Love in a Dying World (American Primitive, 2018), was recorded in Los Angeles with producer Joe Cardamone (The Icarus Line / Skeleton Joe, Mark Lanegan's last collaborator), and paired with an experimental film shot by Stella in the Californian deserts. The production of For the Love, the Death and the Poetry was curated by Matt Bordin (Squadra Omega), already producer of the following album Tales of Faith and Lunacy (Nasoni Records Berlin/BloodRock, 2020) and Of Knowledge and Revelation (Subsound Records, 2022), both of which have been mentioned in numerous year-end charts among the best musical works.
