Genre bender from SPACE
Loud guitar music has been around for a while now. Starting in the 60's with hard and psychedelic rock, later on our beloved genre of heavy metal, hardcore punk and many more forms as time went on. Some people say that today loud guitar music is at a creative dead end and that everything new does not come close to the massive innovations of yore. Personally while I do understand it when people make this point I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. I think a comparison with a middle aged person is apt. Not likely to really change their lives any more but still capable of pulling out some creative new tricks and honing what the person already is capable off. Okkultokrati has done the former on Raspberry Dawn.
Raspberry Dawn combines quite a few familiar sounds together in one new fresh experience. From d-beat, post-punk, kraut rock and black metal to darkwave. All these genres are present on this record. What is interesting is that they manage to morph the various elements of these genres to create a better, more homogeneous whole. The most common drum beat on this record is the d-beat but instead of implementing it in the traditional mosh pit inducing manner, they soften it up. The result is something that is quite similar to the motorik beat. This allows the more psychedelic and post-punk elements on this album to function. The guitar riffs are mostly punky, but then in order to make the whole work, the band used a pretty noisy guitar tone and went for a lot of repetition when it comes to the guitar riffs. These kind of adaptations to make the whole function better is applied to every element on this record. Frankly it is also the only way to make such an eclectic mixture of genres work and work it does. The end product is remarkably good from start to finish with all the different elements coming together to create something excellent.
I think eclectic
bands work best when the end result is something still homogeneous
and no eclectic band I’ve ever heard pushes as much for homogeneity
as Okkultokrati do on this album. This is an album for people with a
broad taste in music that get turned off by bands trying to hard to
mash genres together.
Final Score: 90/100
Bandcamp
No comments:
Post a Comment