Review by: Michael Stewart
To be abrupt: Koresh play sludge as quickly as possible. Or so it seems to these
ears. Crippledriver demands a few listens before the inevitable union of fingers
and keyboard, which could well be to the band’s credit. That, sadly, is about as
remarkable as proceedings get here. There’s more than a faint whiff of Buzzov*en
around the nine tracks on offer, however Koresh seem to have taken the punk
underpinnings of said band to illogically brief conclusions. Rarely is any group
charged with this misdemeanour, but the majority of their songs are simply too short,
too epigrammatic to really satisfy. And while these songs never meander – there
simply isn’t enough time for them to do so, after all – the cumulative effect of their
careening brevity is that the listener could be at almost any point in the record and not
know the difference. Only by the time ‘Airborne Sumo’ and ‘Chinaski’ come around
(tracks seven and eight respectively) does the pace change sufficiently for you to perk
up and realise that the disc is still spinning. Going on the strength of these tracks,
future efforts may be better; for the most part, though, this is strangely listless.