by Oliver on August 31, 2023 in Album
In keeping with the monstrous, imposing, mythological Daikaijū scuffle on the cover, the ambitions are there Chepang grown: On Swatta the grinders have been working for years. The result is a concept monolith running for almost 50 minutes, 29 attacks including numerous well-known guests Ikagaii.e. provisionally translated to the Japanese principle of “value of lifes“.
„Swatta is record where one will find everything from Chepang sonically and collaboratively. The record represents everything we have felt for the entirety of our lives as human beings into a big slab of wax. The main message is about hope and finding happiness in chaos and negativity“ says the band, which is based on the axis from Nepal and New York, about their holistic third work, which consists of four parts.
First and foremost are and will remain Chepang However, a grindcore gang, which is why page A (or the first eleven numbers) is also dedicated to this core competence. With snarling intensity, unleashing a stream of drooling and hissing and guttural rattles over blast beats (possibly even two drums at the same time) and hyperventilating, pounding riffs with a metallic edge. With only short pauses for breath, it rips together with a brutal hardcore mentality, the energy and dynamics are furious – and the songwriting is even better at times: Anurodh distills the melodic aspects of the attacks, making up the memorable motifs of Bright form an ambient finale. Anumati shimmers thanks to a towering Takafumi Matsubara and Ascharya makes mathy click his tongue before Anyol fades away in the drone. Absolute masters of their trade are at work there, variable and compelling.
After that, the band fanned out their spectrum even further (within this basis), trying to create experimental perspectives on their genre character through internal and external impulses.
In segment B (or songs 11 to 14) this happens by Chepang wring longer, more progressively structured anti-compositions. Born out of the futuristic cyber-synth, the bulge finally develops a progressive jam with a preference for staccato and saxophone brain rage, ultimately tending even more towards the avant-garde death of Imperial Triumphant with slingshot thrash elements, smothered as an impulsive odyssey that instinctively sweeps you away, and resolves as a swirling dream that makes no distinction between beauty and fury: this feverish elimination of the basic, super-compact grind format (or rather: stretching the conventions of the genres) suits the band perfectly.
In the following section C (songs 15 to 24), on the other hand, an illustrious list of features is tempting, provoking the comfort zone from deliberately short, spastic escalations to a demonic, ambient-impregnated nightmare intoxication (DK misses about the distance from Darkwave to the Melvins in grunting pigsty), which mixes grindcore with dizzying guitar rollercoaster rides (DMT) turns into a sequence of individual scenes with chaotic rapidity, eliminates the overriding arc of suspense through the synapse overreaction and makes arbitrariness the unifying stylistic device.
As the only logical reaction to human interaction, the concluding page D (tracks 25 to 29) can consequently only be completed with an apparently AI purgatory (“trained using Realtime Audio Variational auto Encoder (RAVE) model by Diwas Bhattarai and Mixed by Colin Marston“) created abstract madness ad absurdum. After that, thanks to this trick, a latently unsatisfactory feeling remains, even without background knowledge of the condition Swatta behind it more on a theoretical meta-level than a conscious generic clusterfuck, when the question arises where grindcore becomes purely aesthetic, where it is only more of a stylistic device for the purpose, and to what extent an emotional bandwidth in the reception would be necessary at all. The circular heavy rotation of this addictive record doesn’t give an answer either.
Swatta by Chepang
similar posts
Print article