She Wants Revenge - 2007 - This Is Forever

Flawless Record – B0010042-02  360.98MB FLAC

 This Is Forever enters the archive like a sealed black room after a sequence of releases devoted to ritual, invented instruments, microscopic electronics, ancestral geography and collective memory. That placement immediately changes its value. She Wants Revenge may not require archaeological reconstruction or an elaborate account of lost musical traditions. The album announces its machinery openly: programmed rhythm, prominent bass, dark synthesizers, clipped guitar, a low male voice, erotic suspicion and relationships treated as elegant forms of mutually assured destruction. Yet simplicity does not make it disposable. Sometimes a familiar room becomes important because of where the corridor places it. After music reaching toward antiquity, spirit and lineage, this record returns to the intensely modern loneliness of people surrounded by technology who still cannot interpret one another.

The cover understands this before the music begins. A woman in black occupies the upper half of an almost completely dark image. Her eyes are cropped away, leaving the lower portion of her face, shoulders, chest and one hand held near her heart. Red lettering spreads beneath her like a title on a psychological thriller. The image mirrors the visual language of the group’s debut, but the white undergarments of that earlier cover have become black, transforming seduction into mourning without changing the basic pose. It resembles a wedding portrait from which the ceremony, groom and future have been removed. The album title promises permanence while everything in the image suggests concealment, disappearance and emotional foreclosure.

This is the central joke and tragedy of This Is Forever. Nearly every relationship described within it appears unstable, manipulative, exhausted or already finished, yet the participants continue speaking in the language of absolutes. Love must be eternal even when it is visibly collapsing. Desire becomes proof of destiny. Pain becomes evidence that the connection was profound. The title is not necessarily a declaration of confidence. It can also be heard as something repeated compulsively because nobody involved believes it anymore. Forever becomes the final word used by people terrified of change.

“First, Love” opens the album as a brief atmospheric entrance rather than a full statement. Its placement resembles a title card appearing before the drama begins, but the comma makes the phrase unstable. It may mean love comes first, an instruction to begin with love, or the first love among several later failures. The electronic haze already contains the feeling of memory being replayed after the relationship has ended. Nothing has happened yet, but the damage is present in advance. The album does not begin with innocence. It begins with innocence remembered by someone who knows what followed.

“Written in Blood” immediately converts romantic commitment into bodily contract. The bass and programmed drums establish the duo’s strongest method: rhythm does not merely support the song but creates a controlled corridor through which the vocal must walk. Justin Warfield’s delivery rarely explodes. He speaks, warns, seduces and accuses from inside a narrow emotional range, allowing repetition and production to supply the intensity. This restraint can be mistaken for limited expression, but it is essential to the group’s atmosphere. The narrator wants to appear composed while revealing increasingly obsessive thoughts. The voice becomes the sound of someone attempting to control the story after control has already been lost.

She Wants Revenge were frequently criticized for the visibility of their influences, and there is no reason to pretend those influences are hidden. The basslines, angular guitar, electronic percussion, funereal vocals and cultivated glamour belong to a lineage extending through post-punk, synth-pop, goth clubs and the early-2000s revival of those forms. The more useful question is not whether the duo invented this language, but what they did with it. Their particular achievement was to reduce an enormous collection of dark musical references into an immediately legible urban melodrama. The songs behave like nightclubs condensed into four-minute scenes: strangers watching one another, couples conducting private wars in public, expensive clothes absorbing sweat, and every confident gesture concealing panic.

“Walking Away” presents departure as an action that may never actually occur. This is a recurring condition throughout the album. Characters announce endings while remaining emotionally trapped inside the scenes they claim to have left. A person can walk away physically while continuing to rehearse every accusation for years. The steady arrangement captures that contradiction. Motion is audible, but liberation is not. The rhythm keeps advancing while the emotional content circles the same injury.

“True Romance” turns one of popular culture’s most flattering phrases into something darker. The title suggests idealized love, but the song recognizes that many people experience intensity as proof of authenticity. A relationship filled with pursuit, jealousy, shame and dramatic reconciliation may feel more “real” than a stable connection precisely because it continually activates fear. She Wants Revenge are fascinated by this confusion. Their songs rarely portray love as mutual understanding. Love is surveillance, appetite, withdrawal and the desperate attempt to maintain power while pretending to surrender it.

The production gives these damaged relationships a sleek physical attractiveness. Adam Bravin’s bass, keyboards, programming and percussion create environments more controlled than the people inhabiting them. Every beat arrives on time even when the narrator does not understand what is happening. Synthesizers form cool surfaces around emotional disorder. Guitar appears in sharpened strokes rather than loose expression. The music resembles an immaculate apartment after an argument, every object still positioned correctly while the atmosphere has become uninhabitable. This contrast between compositional order and psychological confusion is the album’s real engine.

“What I Want” makes the controlling impulse explicit. Desire is stated as entitlement, and the groove gives that entitlement charisma. This is important because the record does not stand outside its narrators and condemn them. It allows unhealthy behavior to remain seductive. The listener may understand that the character is possessive, manipulative or emotionally immature while still responding to the bassline. That discomfort is more interesting than a moral lesson. Popular music has always allowed us to inhabit voices whose behavior we would reject in daily life. She Wants Revenge intensify that contradiction until the dance floor becomes a temporary courtroom where nobody has agreed upon the charges.

“It’s Just Begun” supplies another false promise of continuation. Throughout the album, beginnings and endings become nearly indistinguishable. A new relationship already contains the emotional habits that will destroy it, while an ending becomes the beginning of obsession, resentment or idealized memory. This is why the title This Is Forever applies even when nothing survives. The experience becomes permanent through repetition inside the mind. The relationship ends, but the internal version continues, edited and replayed until it may become more powerful than anything that actually occurred.

“She Will Always Be a Broken Girl” is the album’s most revealing title and one of its most ethically uncomfortable ideas. The phrase turns another person’s pain into permanent identity. She is not temporarily hurt or responding to particular circumstances. She will always be broken. Such a declaration can masquerade as sympathy while functioning as control, because defining another person as irreparably damaged allows the speaker to become observer, rescuer or exploiter. The song also reflects a recurring figure in dark romantic culture: the beautiful wounded woman whose suffering increases her allure. She Wants Revenge do not invent this figure, but they expose how efficiently popular music, cinema and private fantasy reproduce her.

The cover participates in that construction. The woman has no visible eyes and therefore cannot return the viewer’s gaze. She becomes body, posture and suggestion, an emblem onto which the album can project danger and vulnerability. Yet her hand complicates the image. It may indicate protection, fear, desire or an attempt to hold herself together. The viewer cannot know because the photograph withholds the information necessary to make her fully legible. That unknowability is appropriate. The men within these songs repeatedly assume they understand women while revealing mainly the architecture of their own fantasies.

“This Is the End” arrives immediately after the broken girl, placing a definitive statement in the middle rather than at the conclusion. The sequence reveals that endings are not trustworthy here. The song stretches beyond five minutes, lingering inside its own declared finality. Nothing ends cleanly because the characters require continued emotional contact, even if contact can only be maintained through accusation. Hatred becomes one more form of attachment. To remain furious is to keep the other person present.

“Checking Out” deepens the album’s exhausted atmosphere. The phrase can describe leaving a hotel, withdrawing attention, ending a relationship or becoming mentally absent while the body remains. That multiplicity suits a record where people are often physically near one another but psychologically unreachable. The music itself remains sharply present, however. The production never checks out. Its exactness gives the emotional withdrawal a hard external boundary, turning dissociation into rhythm.

“Pretend the World Has Ended” may contain the album’s most accurate description of romantic isolation. Lovers frequently construct a private world by treating everyone and everything outside the relationship as irrelevant. This can feel intimate and protective, but it can also become a method of avoiding reality. Pretending the world has ended eliminates social obligations, history, consequences and alternative perspectives. Only the couple remains, trapped inside a fantasy whose apparent freedom depends upon total enclosure. The song’s attraction lies in understanding why someone would want this. The world is noisy, demanding and difficult. Two people can momentarily create a sealed universe in which every uncertainty seems answered by the other’s presence.

Placed within this particular archive sequence, that desire for enclosure becomes even more pronounced. Potomitan had treated identity as something created through ancestors, family, landscape, rhythm, migration and spiritual relationships extending beyond one lifetime. This Is Forever retreats from that immense network into the couple, then demonstrates how unbearable the couple becomes when expected to provide an entire universe. One record finds strength by recognizing connections across generations. The other portrays people demanding that one romantic partner satisfy every need for meaning, validation, sex, mystery, danger and permanence. The contrast is not evidence that one album is profound and the other shallow. It reveals two radically different maps of human dependence.

“Replacement” confronts the fear beneath much romantic possessiveness: the possibility that one’s supposedly unique place can be occupied by someone else. People want to believe their relationships are irreplaceable because irreplaceability offers protection against mortality and abandonment. Yet the modern city continually presents new bodies, attractions and imagined alternatives. The song’s controlled repetition mirrors obsessive comparison. Who came before? Who comes next? Was the connection singular, or merely one instance of a pattern that will continue with different participants?

“All Those Moments” briefly reduces the scale after the album’s longer dramas. Memory arrives not as one coherent story but as accumulated scenes: rooms, gestures, statements, clothing, departures, physical contact and small humiliations. A relationship may be over, but its moments remain stored without agreeing upon what they mean. This short track feels like fragments passing quickly through consciousness before the final name appears.

“Rachael” closes the album by transforming the generalized feminine figure into one apparently specific person. After songs filled with “she,” “girl,” “you” and archetypal romantic roles, a name creates the sensation that the fog has briefly cleared. Yet a name does not guarantee understanding. Rachael may be more real to the narrator while remaining unknown to the listener. The album ends with specificity that produces another mystery, as though every previous scene could have been one long attempt to explain why this particular person cannot be forgotten.

This Is Forever was never likely to satisfy listeners demanding novelty from every musical component. Its vocabulary is deliberately inherited, its emotional world narrow, and its characters repeatedly make the same mistakes. But repetition is part of its historical value. The album preserves a moment when post-punk darkness had reentered mainstream alternative culture as fashion, dance music and romantic theater. Young listeners could encounter echoes of earlier underground forms without knowing every point of origin, while older listeners could hear familiar structures compressed into a polished new cycle. Revival is not merely imitation. It is also evidence that certain emotional and sonic shapes remain useful to people born into different circumstances.

The album’s limitations therefore become part of its identity. Its gender dynamics can be uncomfortable, its narrators self-dramatizing, and its reliance upon established darkwave signals unmistakable. Yet those qualities produce an unusually coherent artifact. It knows exactly what room it wants to create and rarely opens a window. The bass remains black clothing for the body, the drum machine keeps emotional chaos moving in straight lines, and the synthesizers turn loneliness into architecture.

Seen alone, this might be one more dark alternative album from 2007. Placed among the thousands of unrelated and secretly related objects in the archive, it becomes a necessary patch of shadow. Its polish intensifies the roughness of neighboring releases. Its romantic enclosure makes collective and ancestral music feel more expansive. Its familiarity provides a recognizable human doorway between stranger sound worlds. This is how an archive becomes greater than an inventory. Each object alters the pressure, color and meaning of everything around it.

A human life works similarly. No individual experience contains the whole picture. One person may judge their own days as ordinary, difficult, successful, wasted or remarkable, but those days have already entered other people’s lives through friendship, work, care, conflict, influence and memory. The full composition cannot be heard from inside one isolated track. This Is Forever may be obsessed with a pair of people attempting to become the entire world to one another, but its place here reveals the opposite truth: meaning grows through connection. Nothing becomes forever by remaining alone.