Insonika – Pithos
Insonika – Pithos
Self-Released
Release Date: 31.10.22
Running Time: 37:02
Review by Dark Juan
8/10
Greetings and salutations, dear friends. It is I, Dark Juan, and I have temporarily been left unattended at Dark Juan Terrace with only one Smellhound, as the Dread Lord, Sir Igor Egbert Bryan Clown-Shoe Cleavage-Hoover has gone to visit his other home (and the grandchild’s) with Mrs Dark Juan, leaving me ensconced at home with Hodgson Biological-Warfare, mainly because my Rona-radged lungs are not permitting me to walk any great distance anywhere at the moment. I haven’t had a drink for two weeks. I am a shadow of my former chubby self and I have coughed that much I feel like I am in danger of opening up a new fault line on the hernia repairs I had done some years previously. Plus, and this is the biggie, friends, they have gone to… I can’t even bring myself to say it.
LANCASHIRE. They have betrayed their Yorkshireness to go to Burnley. The shame…
So, upon being left unattended and mindlessly scrolling through Fuckbook for what seemed like a fucking age, and boring myself absolutely fucking rigid, I have dragged the Pooter Of Eternal Peril on to my lap and am tackling my review list, so you lot out there can have something resembling an informed opinion about what is worth splooging your spondulicks on. We shall not discuss the recent conversation on the Ever-Metal Whatsapp staff group which I experienced recently where it was somewhat scurrilously claimed that my writings are not clear and concise and that the bands I have reviewed CANNOT BE SURE WHETHER OR NOT I LIKE THEIR OUTPUT. This of course is an outrageous and egregious falsehood and my ramblings are masterpieces of brevity and clarity.
Two hundred and ninety-four words in… Hmm. Perhaps they have a point.
Today I am experiencing the musical stylings of Jönköping, Sweden based Insonika and their semi-concept album “Pithos”, based loosely on the legend of Pandora’s Box (I’ve seen Pandora’s box, and I don’t mind telling you it’s like a punched lasagne or a kicked over trifle) and it’s a bit of an unusual one as it seems to combine (to these poor, abused ears) Swedish lightweight (but still absolutely awesome) Satan-botherers Ghost, bits of less proggy Mastodon and the heavyweight Stoner sounds of Truckfighters and Sleep. This is a fairly eclectic mélange of influences and one I am not sure will be entirely functional. Like my lungs, currently. However, in we plunge…
Opening cut ‘Pandora’ sets a rather spooky tone rather darker than I was expecting for a Stoner band. There’s a twisted, malformed quality to the music that immediately sets it apart from the Stoner herd – an almost Gothic vibe predominates with the mournful piano intro and simple clean guitar line until distortion comes in and causes geological instability over the vocals of Oscar Flanagan (who doesn’t, to be fair, sound very Swedish with a name like that, to be sure), which in themselves are an interesting combination of Ozzy and the various Papa Emeritus’s (Emeratii?) [It’s actually “emeriti”, which can be gleaned by anybody with a Classical education, or a web-browser – ED]. This over some thunderous and engaging Metal.
The band don’t fall into the Stoner trap of creating a song that is composed of 47 minutes of a single riff before realising that there’s three other parts of the song still to go and they are nearly out of studio time for the day. This is bloody good stuff that really does play to the strengths of the band. Insonika are possessed of serious chops, the music being meaty and surprisingly dense considering the source material being a basic Stoner blueprint. However, where the band really shine is when they start to experiment a bit – ‘Dunes Of War’ sounding not unlike “Meliora” era Ghost and they stick keyboards and atmospherics into their sound and dial down the drug-fuelled riff madness for a little more light and shade, Oscar crooning rather than opening his very capable throat, but with a super stoned middle eight and break to fade that is sludgy supremacy throughout, underpinned by groaning church organ – this song is heavier than your grandmother dropping through a quantum singularity and getting her fat ass stuck in it.
Insonika are absolutely more than the sum of their Stoner parts – ‘Pithos’, the title track of the album, injects a sense of menace and drama that Stoner bands normally are entirely missing from their music and adds to the overall dangerous ambience of the track by allowing Oscar to open his prodigious throat and roar like he’s shitting razor blades, contrasting the violence of that style with the sinuous, preening and predatory ambience of the cleaner parts. And there’s a metric fuckton of church organ on it as well. Dark Juan is more than partial to a bit of brooding organ, be it church or Hammond. ‘Pithos’ ably displays a Mastodon influence at work, with dissonant riffing and onomatopoeic vocals reminding this listener of ‘Oblivion’ in particular, although I find the central part of the song a little too drawn out for my taste. They could easily have lost a minute and a half of runtime without missing it, such is their devotion to the groove they have found and exploited the fuck out of…
‘Monsters In My Head’ is Insonika at their most Sabbathian, the vocals sounding Ozzy-esque, without aping the man himself but with lashings of added Hammond organ underpinning the whole fuzzy riffmonster of a song giving it an almost dark carnival vibe in places. There’s even parts where there is an almost Hardcore beatdown where the band are singing “Beat. You. Down” and it is frankly all as groovy as it is possible to be, and I find myself becoming more and more of an Insonika fan the more I listen. I would have considered an intermix of Ghost and Sleep a bit much to stomach, but Insonika are more than up to the challenge of making it sound palatable.
Points against Insonika then – The band are far too fond of stretching songs out at the end by just having large, expansive two and three minute outros where they stop playing and start noodling a bit, which sometimes does grate as their song-writing prowess is so much better than that. Also, I find the recording of the album slightly too bass-heavy in places. It is such a colossal fuzzbeast that it absolutely strangles the guitar into submission at times and can also render the keys indistinct. This is especially noticeable on ‘The Plague’ on the quiet bit where I can hear the bass actually vibrating the wires on the snare drum and rattling the cabinets to an insane degree. Otherwise, the album has a thick, syrupy and rich production that suits the music entirely, giving the compositions that blunt, rusty, well-used edge that Stoner needs.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (det patenterade Dark Juan bedömningssystem för blodstänk – Thank you, Sofie Posserud-Jones, for translating this for me, although she was unsurprisingly modest about it when she did it) awards Insonika 8/10 for a work of flawed genius – with a little more quality control this album was a solid 10 for the meaty, beaty, big and bouncy quality of the band, but an over-reliance on extended outros and too heavy bass caused marks to be removed. Still, very, VERY worth a punt as “Pithos” is a bloody good record despite its flaws.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Pandora
02. Pithos
03. Monsters In My Head
04. The Plague
05. Warmongers
06. Dunes Of War
LINE-UP:
Oscar Flanagan – Vocals, Guitar
Mattias Altgärde – Drums
Daniel Englafors – Bass
Sebastian Fingal – Keyboards, rhythm guitar
LINKS:
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