Once again I find myself suckered by artwork. ‘Evil walks’, the first missive from the Texas mentalists Korperscwache to appear on influential label Crucial Blast, comes dressed in the sort of artwork most bands would sever the odd limb fo,r and once you open up the smart looking digi-pack and place the disc in your player you quickly discover that the picture of a giant rat tearing the innards out of an innocent dear is entirely apt to the disturbing, fascinating, beautiful, ugly music that is contained within.
Actually far more melodic than the press release might have you believe, Korperschwache deal in droning, down-tuned, painfully slow music overlaid with barely recognisable vocals that is far more about conjuring atmosphere than anything else. Metal in only the widest possible sense, this is rather the sound of a lonely person sitting at a darkened bar, deep in the forest, at three in the morning, sipping Absinthe and preparing themselves for the long journey home through a deserted stretch of wasteland beset by Wolves and other denizens of the night. On the first track, “there is a certain smell attractive to wolves” we are broken in with a creepy sample before layer-upon-layer of buzzing guitars sitting somewhere between Sunn 0))) and Ulver slither across the surface and create a dense drone that still conveys melody as well as an ambient feeling of desolation. Followed by the pounding “Ouroboros: First lesson”, the first track sets the scene well, while the second conjures up an image of a chase rather than a static, screaming, bloody murder and the strangely Joy Division-esque drums actually work here really well to recall that band’s sense of lonely fury and cold desperation while the horrendously distorted bass threatens to blow out speaker cones at any serious volume.
Of course, Korperschwache’s music really doesn’t suit a traditional track-by-track breakdown. Each track contributes to the atmosphere of slow burning dread that permeates the band’s music, yet each track is also subtly different and imbued with an ambience of its own. An example is the difference between the heavy, churning ‘the rearing elephant’ and the subtle, Jesu-esque ‘Me and you and a can of gasoline’ which employs hypnotic rhythms and grinding guitar to weave its silken, yet deadly web around you. Meanwhile samples are carefully chosen and placed for maximum impact with the band creating a similar effect to the horror-movie sampling Buzzo*ven who so comprehensively rearranged people’s nerve-endings on the groundbreaking ‘sore’. However, the difference is that Korperschwache rarely explode and when they do, as on ‘burning man’ it is a truly unhinged din that they make which, stripped of the context of the rest of the record, would seem less than impressive but, here, now, built into the surrounding tracks through gentle segues and lunatic laughing, it never sounds anything less than an ambitious and open-minded attempt to create something genuinely new.
Like so many bands featured here on SonicAbuse, Korperschwache are a band for those avid fans who like to listen to an album as a complete piece of art rather than shovel it onto their Ipod shuffle so that they have a noisy, but ultimately forgettable soundtrack to their walk into work. Dislocated from their surroundings the tracks on ‘Evil walks’ are confused, lost and messy. Complete they are artistic, subtle and perfect. This is an album that needs to be placed into your CD player when you have a spare hour and nothing more to do than appreciate good music and then left there until the last discordant note has been wrung from the little silver disc of doom. Anything less is a disservice to the effort put into the project by the talented and interesting musicians involved. Equally, those interested by this album really should check out the physical version rather than the download as Nicole Boitos’ artwork (which graces both the cover and the carefully laid-out booklet) is beautifully rendered and entirely appropriate to the dark, sometimes blackened nature of the music.
This is a wonderful record that breaks down the barriers between black metal, ambient and drone and effectively utilises only what it needs from each of those genres to create an unsettling, yet fascinating masterpiece that is unique in its otherworldliness and sense of dread. A worthwhile trip for those looking for a musical journey into the hinterland of dread.
