I must admit my ignorance of this band in the past, although as a drummer I
guess I ought to have heard about it and mastermind Damon Che. This is certainly
no easy music or album to review – the music is very complex and changes in
strange ways in beats and riffs – if you want your music to be simple and
straight ahead stay a long way away from this – or maybe try to provoke yourself
with music for the tricky mind.
I wasn’t familiar with the term “math-rock” before, but so I’ve seen it
described elsewhere – I guess it covers “constructed” rock with odd rhythms…
As mentioned before I can’t compare to the earlier works of the band and
previous line-ups, but if you think of jazz-rock-fusion bands like King Crimson
or Gong of the 80’s/90’s (goes metal or punk sometimes), I don’t think you’re
that far off what is presented here. And although there’s some exciting riffs
and strange beats thrown in on this album, and there’s some of it that gets a
little close to getting heavy, and more wild than the bands I mentioned before,
it’s neither new or particularly original to an extent that makes me raise my
eyebrows very much. And this is in my opinion one of the weak point of this
album, because in spite of good musicianship and several good ideas, it never
really thrills or surprises me. It’s solid craftsmanship, but not
groundbreaking.
The other weak point for me is, that it sometimes gets a bit too repetitive in
riff/idea before it moves on, enough to make me ask myself where they want to go
– and then sometimes they don’t…Crazy riffs and weird beats doesn’t do the trick
for themselves, there’s gotta be good composing and maybe a overall idea too,
and this is where I think this album lacks something.
It gets punky on couple of the last numbers of the album when they start “singing”(if
you can call it that when it sounds like punk) – I’d prefer they didn’t…
I can’t really decide whether I like this album or it bores me, I’m sort of
caught in between – if you like the above mentioned styles and bands try it out
for yourself.
