Taste Your Rose by Ophelia Moon is not a song, it is more of an experience, and an immersion into the realm of the sensually dark and poetically charged. This new issuance of the Philadelphia based project takes possession of that illusive fleeting space between sound, emotion and story-telling to create something deeply personal and surreal at the same time.
Taste your rose is written and performed by Darren O. Moon with Ricky Mazzamauro taking care of the instrumental arrangement, which makes it look like a confession spoken through smoke and candlelight. The vocal performance of Darren is haunted and hypnotic simultaneously, it is a performance, which appears to be on the brink of desire and submission. His voice is shaky, more of a spiritual pain, which brings the listener into the emotion of love and exposure.
The setting of Ricky fits that intensity well enough. The performance is carried out in a film-like progression, the atmospheric guitars, the touchy percussion and the melodies which twist and shimmer as half-remembered dreams. The rhythm of the song is somewhat tense and releasing, which reflects the emotional push-pull of the song lyrics themselves. The music has a tactile quality, as it is like you can touch the heat and the gravity of each line.
Finding a collision between pleasure and pain, love and destruction, the unnatural beauty of giving oneself up, is the lyrical theme of Taste Your Rose. It is poetry with a veil of mysticism, a commentary on human desire to be connected with each other even in pain.
Such a combination of intelligence and feeling is what makes Ophelia Moon so fascinating. We do not merely listen to the beautiful in Taste Your Rose, but we can touch it and it possesses a sense of a habitation, experience, longing, and artistic boldness. It is a daring addition to their cumulative collection of work and another step in their quest to the most enigmatic mysteries of life in the form of music. This is the type of song that does not die when it finishes it haunts, faintly lingering, long after the last note.