The music of singer Ian Revell, guitarist and keyboard player Karl Mohr Benjamin Mueller-Heaslip is even more than just death rock or post-punk. The first song (and also the single) Black Box immediately evokes the dark days of The The, while Diamond Cutter is almost a tribute to the later Wire. Those names do not just fall from the sky, because the ten songs (even including the cover of The Stranger by Rozz Williams) have an idiosyncratic post-punk sound that can be situated somewhere between Television and Bauhaus. So, do not expect any sing-alongs like say Editors or White Lies, but rather intelligent compositions with a dark twist like She’s Falling, that could have been written by Nick Cave.

No,this Canadian trio doesn’t makes it easy for the listener, but that’s a good thing. That is why we still listen to Marquee Moon after 40 years, and that could be the case with Seven Years too!

8/10
Didier Becu

http://www.peek-a-boo-magazine.be/en/reviews/double-eyelid-seven-years/

Broken Mirror is essentially 11 remixed tracks from the album Seven Years in 2014, but as I haven’t heard the album I can assure you this works well as a piece of its own. What drew me to wanting to hear this release was that two remixes were done by bands (Leaether Strip/Psyche) I have been a fan of for a very long time and been fortunate to work with myself, so my interest was piqued and I am happy to say I was not disappointed.

Leaether Strip’s remix of ‘The Stranger’ opens the album and sets the rest of the tracks up well. The first thing I thought of when I heard the track was the familiarity of the LS sound and that the vocals of Ian Revell were not dissimilar to Matt Johnson though somewhat more breathy and maybe a little more intense and emotional and that impression happily continues throughout the album.

The Reactive Black remix of ‘Black Box’ follows and it has the classic hallmarks of goth styled love songs with big guitars, clean beats, weird background pads,chorus vox, steady basslines and that breathy dramatic vocal. EBM steps back in for the Tyler Milchmann remix of ‘Dead Is Better’ which was the single and video from the album. Clean crisp and slightly unnerving in the best of ways.

‘Woman Hanged’ (nTTx remix) is a punchy bassline of a track with guitar stabs and almost industrial sweeps throughout the background with the again whispery vocals that by now make you, for now, forget the Matt Johnson similarity and enjoy them for what they are in amongst the music. Psyche’s remix of ‘Black Box’ follows and takes us through a cold/darkwave version of the original track. Tinkling piano with minimal bass and beats. A beautiful version and nothing less than expected from Psyche.

Dead Red Velvet (also the guitarists project) gives us an almost ten minute version of ‘Diamond Cutter’. I love this track and as such it now sits in my DJ folder of tracks to play. A wall of sounds and beats that grow and grow and grow and almost overwhelm you. Just as its about to get too much noise to discern, it drops out to the effected vocals and rolls through various bits of the intro sounds and beats. Ten minutes goes through quickly as there are acid basslines, trance, guitars and different beats that keep it interesting all the way through. The stand out track on the release I believe.

The Matt Johnson comparison really shows through again with the DJ Cruel Britannia remix of ‘She’s Falling’ and brings us nicely back to a goth tinged feeling which feels closer to the concept of Double Eyelid although with more synth-bass and pad involvement. ‘Dead Is Better’ gets another work over, this time, from Lanada. This version sees more of a chaotic instrumental attack with drops, rises, female vox and a more of a clubby track feel to it.

The Klomb remix of ‘The Stranger’ is the shortest track on ‘Broken Mirror’ with lots of punchy beats, old school acid techno sounds, drops and breaks. ‘Cold is Better’ is again a more minimal version of what’s already been on the release and adds some rollicking guitar and deep heavy basslines to push the track through nicely.

We finish up with the sonically disturbing (in a good way) Double Echo remix of Woman Hanged titled ‘Hanged in Dub’. And plenty of that awesome dub style is in there in the way of echos and reverb in and out of the track smothering and enlightening the vox. Brilliant.

Broken Mirror as said before, is 11 tracks running at just under the 65 minute mark and while there are 6 originals remixed, they are varied and interesting enough that this release stands well on its own as an album to listen to. With some remix-only releases, you do get the feeling you’re listening to the same song with a slightly different *thing* happening in it. Thankfully, with Double Eyelids Broken Mirror you don’t get that vibe, which in itself isn’t an easy task to achieve. There are great songs for DJs to use in pretty much all the EBM/goth/gothrock genres as well as being a great album to just plug in and play loud.

I suggest you go and do just that!

8.5/10

http://brutalresonance.com/review/double-eyelid-broken-mirror/

Double Eyelid, formed back in 2009 by Ian Revell, released their debut album, Seven Years, last year to much acclaim. Now, tracks from that release have been re-mixed and re-interpreted by artists from the goth and industrial scene, including Leaether Strip, Psyche, nTTx and Tyler Milchmann. However, you don’t have to have heard Seven Years to enjoy these new versions.

There are obvious influences from the early 80s – Bauhaus, Bowie – but also the art rock of Sex Gang Children and Roxy Music, the literature of Poe, the cinema of noir, and the theatre of Grand Guignol to create a witch’s brew of dark music that probes our primeval vestigial fears and subconscious superstitions. The music inhabits a place where dreams vie with nightmares and nothing is quite what it seems. These are songs of graveyard vistas and cityscapes of creatures who inhabit the subterranean clubs and shadows of urban decay. But Double Eyelid never lose sight of a damn good tune. They may wear their influences on their sleeves, but the cufflinks are the artists own.

It opens with a cover of Daucus Karota’s The Stranger (re-mixed by Leather Strip). It has a dark beat overlaid with seductive vocals that creates images of a gothic nightclub. It builds up with sinister undertones. There is another re-mix of this song on the album (by Klomb) and that one sounds as though it could be used as a soundtrack to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Indeed many of these songs could be used as soundtracks, conjuring up images akin to Blade Runner or the first Terminator film. It’s testament to the multi-layered and tension building arrangements of these songs that they can create such vivid imagery.

Back Box (Reactive Black re-mix) has a heavy, grinding guitar that reminds me of Iggy Pop’s The Idiot. It’s an unrelenting dark romance. There is a theme running through many of the songs of mysterious women and obsessive men. You know it’s not gonna end well. It’s a great song that gets a completely different mix by Psyche – that mix is sinister, jerky, with off kilter rhythms. It feels like you’re entering the haunted house on the hill.

The original Dead Is Better is a modern classic of the genre and Broken Mirror includes three mixes of this great song. The first version is a Tyler Milchmann mix and evokes a gothic soundscape where cemeteries are places of regret and broken dreams. Dead Is Better is all about moving on – some things are better dead. But the female protagonist of the song forms attachments that she can’t move on from, that will always hold her back, and drives her to visit that graveyard of memory where she picks over the bones of what might have been. This first version has overtones of Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack mixed up with Sisters Of Mercy. The second version, mixed by Lanada, has a burlesque, dark cabaret, feel to it. The final version, renamed Cold Is Better, positively crackles with ice. You can feel the cold as it starts, the guitar coming in like brittle sunlight. Then, in the distance, the sound of thunder, or maybe the ululation of an ice-breaker ship, searching for the monster in the frozen seas. The guitar now jerks like Psycho’s knife and the melancholic, almost fearful, vocals sound across the bleakness. It’s a dark joy.

Broken Mirror is a perfect companion piece to Seven Years which can be fully enjoyed on its own. It’s a minor masterpiece and shows that the darker side of rock still has so much to offer. Double Eyelid are a band well worth discovering. Just peel back your skin and plug them into the darkest regions of your brain.

08/10

http://louderthanwar.com/double-eyelid-broken-mirror-album-review/

MICK MERCER, long-time goth/post-punk fanatic and historian himself hailed this as a classic, and that it was “easily one of the years best.” I’m not often one to fully agree with Mr. MERCER, but in this case he is correct. I can truly say it’s not quite like anything else I’ve come across before. DOUBLE EYELID is an unexpected expansion of a long-stalled, almost stuck in its own trap genre – – – a deep lungful of beautifully perfumed and noxious air.

Some of my favorite tracks: “Diamond Cutter” — A beautiful song with a consistent, relentlessly rising and falling rhythm that does indeed capture the effect of a diamond cutter slowly slicing into one’s heart and soul; “John” — A subtly heavy, gruesome tale of deathbed sorrow, regret, desperation, and loneliness; “Dead Is Better” — Proving there are worse, far more painful things than death (usually love), the heaviness not so subtle this time; There is an amazing cover of ROZZ WILLIAMS band DAUCUS KAROTA’s “The Stranger,” perhaps better than even the original *(dare I say – – – I know, blasphemy! Eh, get over it, slip this in and give a listen, you’ll hear what I mean.); and possibly (lyrically and conceptually, at the very least), “The Hanged Woman” — About that faux-soulmate of total self-absorption and psyche-vampirism, her self-made Ouroboros of a self-perpetuated shitty life that she will never take responsibility for, forever haunting every achingly lonely and dull moment she has fashioned with her own hands. It will always be “someone elses fault,” regardless of situation or circumstance.

Through and through, this album is an amazing journey through all the pains of the heart, mind, and soul, and their driving functions, circumstances, and fall-outs, without any of the hokey hullabaloo that often gives the scene its own bad name. BUY THIS ALBUM, especially if this is your preferred genre (gothic rock), or you just want to hear truly original and experimental, intelligent, danceabley dark glitter-goth-glam. If not, take a chance, it might resonate with you the right way.

Full post here: https://theintestinalfortitude.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/double-eyelid-seven-years-album-review-by-vincent-daemon/

No, I cannot give you the genre; simply because Double Eyelid is something you have never heard before. Experimenting with death rock, electro rock, darkwave and glam rock and adding a lot of dramatic moments to the sound, is probably the easiest way to go. This album is so incredibly dense, yet so fluid, it’s almost surreal. And while I was listening to it, it got all these strange and unconnected associations; varying from musicians such as Michael Jackson, Christian Death, Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie and Nina Hagen and literary works, like Bram Stoker’s gothic horror masterpiece Dracula and the absurd and avant-garde play The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco. Yes, this album is everything: artsy, avant-garde, dramatic, dark, passionate, flirty, romantic, weird and so incredibly profound. The complex structure combining electronic features with pure death rock guitar driven melodies, additional piano tunes and entrancing vocals create very theatrical and romantic atmosphere, filled with pathos, despair, obnoxiousness and well – on the other side – love, romanticism and affection. Some songs are more slow-paced and almost dreadful or even vile, such as ”She’s Falling”, while others explore a more rock-on based sound, for example ”The Quick And The Dead” or ”John”. The bass line on the opening track, ”Black Box” seems awfully strange to me though, but I have not to this day deciphered what it reminds me of. Nonetheless, there is no sign of copying anyone or anything, don’t get me wrong, because all in all, the opening song is just as theatrical, obscure and over-the-top, while not trespassing the boundaries of disconnected distortion, as the other tracks. The pulsating sound of ”Diamond Cutter” alongside Ian’s deeply vehement vocals create a special, sexy and intense ambient, which reminds me of what the oozing and tense Nine Inch Nails’s famous song ”Closer” was presenting. Double Eyelid also honoured the late and legendary Rozz Williams by covering ”The Stranger” and decided to end the album with a grandiose, darkly cliff-hanger ”He Fell”.

Seven Years will definitely be one of my top albums of this year; simply, because I consider myself an ”adventurous experimentalist” when it comes to music, and this album simply fits to that. Imagine a painter, standing in front of a blank canvas and splattering all the different colours on it, resulting in creating a beautiful painting, which holds a very strong story behind it. That’s what Double Eyelid does – with music. The splatter becomes reality, becomes art and delivers a message; gloomy, deep, fiery and aesthetic. I am no master in psychology of art (no shit, Sherlock), but this album is an artistic composition, that will evoke a wide palette of emotions and I can only wish for this band to continue the path they are on, bringing us something fresh, unique and so highly addictive in the future.

http://www.terrarelicta.com/index.php/reviews/all-reviews/3262-double-eyelid-seven-years-2014-review