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Komaframe – Overthinking   
Anxiety rarely sounds this thrilling. Komaframe, the solo alias of a Roman multi-instrumentalist who has so far kept to the shadows, has called his new single "Overthinking", and the title is a neat joke at the music's expense. The mind at 3 a.m. does not meander. It tailgates, flashes its lights and refuses to pull over. This is the sound of that, and I would be lying if I said I minded.

Komaframe works wordlessly, which is a brave policy in a business that prizes the confessional hook. His method is to treat the instrumental as a short film, with stoner-rock weight, psychedelic haze and alt-rock nerviness standing in for cast, set and score. Previous releases have wandered through those scenes with the unhurried gait of a man who has all night. "Overthinking" is the chase sequence, and the artist himself has helpfully supplied the speed limit: perfect, he says, for a chase scene at 200 km per hour. For once the sleeve-note boast is not an exaggeration.


The synthesisers take the wheel. They come in pulsing and slightly sinister, in the manner of Massive Attack scoring a bad night in Bristol, then tighten by degrees until the whole arrangement hums like an overloaded cable. Against them the electric guitar behaves less like a lead instrument than a collision waiting to happen. The riffs are thick and heavy-lidded, lifted from the stoner canon, but here they are dragged out of the desert and thrown down a Roman side street at breakneck pace. The result recalls Radiohead's restless years, when Thom Yorke's band discovered that a guitar could be made to sound like a machine in distress, though Komaframe keeps his own counsel and never slips into pastiche.


What he understands, and what many bedroom auteurs forget, is that tension is an architectural matter. Nothing here is thrown at the wall. Each layer arrives like a new suspect in the frame, and the track builds with a cold, deliberate logic that makes the eventual crescendo feel earned rather than merely loud. The paroxysm promised in the press notes duly arrives, a whirlwind of keys and distortion in which the two instruments stop trading blows and start fighting on the same side. It is a lovely, vicious piece of ensemble playing, especially when you remember that one man is responsible for all of it.


That man, we are told, tracked the thing at home in Rome before handing it to a professional studio for mixing and mastering, and the division of labour pays off. The ideas keep the intimacy and unsettled nerve of a private obsession, while the finish gives them the punch of a cinema system turned up one notch past polite. The low end is menacing without turning to mud, and the synths glitter like wet tarmac under streetlamps. Nobody has skimped, and nothing sounds precious.


Those terms are impressive. Komaframe has taken the borrowed vocabulary of film-score moodiness and written something urgent and a little bit dangerous with it. "Overthinking" is the most electronic and combustible thing he has released, and one hopes it is a signpost rather than a detour. Someone should hand this man a director, and failing that, a very long and very empty road.