Labels: art for blind – Codex – Desertion
Review by: Oli Saunders
When I buy records I get them sent to work and it’s always great to turn up in the morning and find that something has arrived, or sometimes something arrives during the day. Then I think… HELL YES. Even though I can’t then play them until I get home, it’s still satisfying. I’m sure arriving home from work and finding records waiting for you also has it’s own merits as you can then play them straight away. Except if they can’t fit through the letterbox and no one is home you have to make a trip to the post office right? Anyway, this split arrived today and I’m now at home ready to put it on.
The first side that plays is Tesa’s, so I will review them first. Tesa hail from Latvia and play sludgy metal post rock type stuff. I don’t know that much about this genre to be honest. It’s nice enough, melodic in places, doom like at other times. The vocals are deep screams of anguish. Things never really get going that much but they’re not meant to I guess. It’s just a bit too slow for my liking and to be honest the screams sound better when I play the record at 45 rpm, much like Coffin Dancer do on their split with Kidcrash. I know that’s harsh, it’s just that I like fast music! The side doesn’t work as a whole at this speed though. Returning to 33 rpm, there is a cool audio sample on the first track, but this is quite a standard thing to do in this kind of music and a lot of bands do it better. Overall, I like the side in places, it’s just not really my thing.
Onto Bökanövsky, this is more like it! The music is a fair bit faster and I’m immediately into it. No fucking about, just great French emo with clear influences from their contemporaries. The vocals are great, then there’s the standard guitar sound, plus the drums pound the fuck away towards the end of the first song. The second song is maybe even better, similar but with quick spoken words in the background in the middle of the song – I love it when bands do this – I can’t understand what they’re saying but that perhaps makes it better. This song is about the pressures of sexuality conformation, still obviously a problem in this fucked up world of ours.
Overall, a cool split. This has apparently taken a year or two to be released. Bökanövsky’s songs sound reasonably similar to the ones on their LP but that’s a good thing. Actually I just read on their website that these songs were two of the first that they ever recorded. I really want to hear what their new stuff sounds like – they’ve got songs recorded for a split with Lakmé but this unfortunately is delayed for the time being. If you like French emo check this out as well as Bökanövsky’s LP. If you like sludge type stuff then maybe check out Tesa too.
26th January 2009