Album: Mechanical Christ
Artist: Kollaps
Label: Cold Spring
Catalogue no: CSR269CD/CSR269LP
- Tracklist:
- Ankara
- Crucify
- Fleshflower
- Blood Premonitions
- Traducer
- Mechanical
Christ
- Love is a War
Let’s cut to the chase
here: what we have here is nothing less than the soundtrack to a society in
decay and on the road to extinction. Despair, anguish, isolation, terror, and
the sheer violence that constitutes much of the present global state of play
has been sublimated through an act of nefarious alchemy into the seven tracks
presented to us by this Australian trio.
This is a portrait of a
world immersed in noise, where everyone’s screaming but no one’s listening.
Harsh, grating, and covered in rust the colour of blood, this is as near to a
prognosis of where we’re heading as you’re likely to get anywhere. Gargantuan
in sound and depth, mechanical and machine-like in execution, and as relentless
as the steamroller of industrial and social ‘progress’ we’ve been witness to in
the last fifty years, it’s almost as if Kollaps have managed to distil the
dichotomous relationship between the pace of scientific evolution and our inability
as a species to cope with it all. And in the space between one state and the
other the very fabric of order and stability are inevitably collapsing.
If the void could
articulate the rush to destruction this would be it: howling, screeching anger
and frustration, voiced through scraping steel and hammering percussive
exclamations, along with distorted and almost unintelligible vocals – we’re yelling
but those with the power to step off the accelerator refuse to listen or take
any notice. Human nature made manifest in sound.
This is at once both
brilliant and frightening, both enlightening and terrifying. It’s both a
clarion call and an epitaph, an apocalyptic manifesto written in blood and
metal. Listen to this on your way to work every morning; turn the TV news and
party political broadcasts down and play this as their soundtracks; listen
along whilst watching gameshows, grifter televangelists, snake oil salesmen,
scenes of destruction and drought, and starving children. It’s all converging
into a singularity, and Kollaps is the star of the show.
File under “Armageddon”.
Psymon Marshall 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment