What on earth do they put in the water in Switzerland that makes them make such relentlessly aggressive music? Kess’khtak formed in 2007 in Geneva and have subsequently carved out an oppressive niche in a realm already populated by acts such as the mighty Colossus Fall. Featuring nine tracks clocking in at under thirty minutes in length, the band’s new album, ‘nurturing conditions for rupture’, more or less does exactly as its title promises by being so utterly, brutally heavy that it is hard to imagine anyone escaping the mosh pit with anything less than a hernia.
Opening with the vicious grind of ‘algorithm of hate’, the band spare no effort to flatten the listener with vocals that leave blood and chunks of throat dangling from the microphone even as the drums threaten to pound the listener deep into the earth’s core with their unending assault. Similarly ‘ripped’, which slams straight out of its forebear, is a thrillingly furious attack on the senses that will leave even hardened metal fans reeling from the ferocity of the band’s angular delivery. ‘Diffusing discord’ is a comparative epic at 3:11 (one of only three songs to tip the three minute mark), making the most of glacial guitars and non-stop d beat percussion that will have fans of acts such as the rotted in thrall to this mechanistic, metallic tsunami of rage and oppression, the only brief let up being a manipulated sample that closes out the track. ‘Scapegoat’, is, if anything, even more furiously unhinged, the vocals reaching ever greater peaks of inhumanity, the roars and growls terrifyingly animalistic in their delivery.
Perhaps one of the album’s most restrained tracks, ‘compulsory silence’ has a guitar riff that is laden with sludge and delivered at a menacing tempo when compared to the whirlwind of hatred found elsewhere. ‘Keep going’ sees business as usual, if not at an enhanced pace, as if the band were making up for the previous track’s slowing of the tempo. With riffs hewn from the living rock and vocals recalling Napalm Death at their most expansively unhinged, it is a crushing and compelling mix of Converge, The Rotted and napalm Death delivered at a breakneck pace by a band who will neither accept nor offer quarter. ‘S.I.C.K’ is ground out with a vitriol that is palpable before ‘manifest sentence’ rises out of a mire of hazy distortion, tearing holes in your senses and leaving you battered and bleeding on the floor with only the one minute long ‘rollity’ to help you gauge your surroundings, which, given the harrowing screams with which it ends, possibly isn’t quite what you needed.
It seems somewhat axiomatic to point out that music as extreme as this is for but a select few, but nonetheless it is worth repeating again simply because the music of Kess’khtak is so resolutely brutal that it is liable to leave the uncertain picking their shattered teeth up from the floor. For those who revel in the dark side, however, there is no question that Kess’khtak are your new favourite band. This horrendously violent release takes the blueprint of Napalm Death and their ilk and ups the ante, offering a frequently stunning (in the truest sense of the word) blizzard of incisive guitars, gruelling percussion and scarifying vocals in a manner that will leave you breathless. With not a moment wasted, the album passes in the blink of an eye, leaving you dizzy and shaking. It is a thrilling, utterly exhausting and entirely merciless ride that is delivered with precision and attitude by the band. Expect no mercy, no quarter and Kess’khtak will turn your world upside down in the best way possible. Relentlessly brutal.
