Blu Mamuth – Ka Ora!
Blu Mamuth – Ka Ora!
Octopus Rising/ Argonauta Records
Release Date: 21/02/25
Running Time: 28:20
Review by Dark Juan
10/10
Good afternoon, dear friends. It is I, Dark Juan. You know, there are some days when the words just flow from you, and then there are times that writing is like pulling your own teeth. I have been lucky over the years to have not really suffered from writer’s block and can normally find something interesting to write about. I mean I wrote pretty much the last review I did entirely in Yorkshire vernacular. I mean, I could do this one in a Lancashire accent, but shush! We don’t talk about Lancashire here…
Anyway, in other news I fell hopelessly in love a couple of days ago with a very beautiful young lady, much to the chagrin of Mrs Dark Juan. Needless to say, it was all Mrs Dark Juan’s fault because she took my granddaughter (who has just discovered Grunge, and whom we adore even more for it) and I to Cuppapug in Manchester. Cuppapug is a café that has roaming Pug dogs. There were more than eight of them there. However, there was one beautiful girl called Cilla there, who parked herself on my lap (unsurprisingly, Dark Juan was stretched out on the floor and batting small children violently and aggressively out of the way in order to have maximum Pug overload) and cuddled me for nearly a whole hour without moving. She gave Mrs Dark Juan a bit of attention too because she’s clever and knew she had to butter Mrs Dark Juan up as well. My heart was lost to Cilla instantly and I might have instantly collared the woman in charge of adoptions and pinned her against the wall by the metaphorical throat in my eagerness and desire to get an adoption form. Which got completed on the spot. Luckily, this good lady recognised my looming over her in a threatening manner, waving my hands about vigorously and shouting as actually being autistic enthusiasm and declared that she had a good feeling about us so we could apply. There is a downside to this, and that is the fact that tomorrow Moss is going to have a pre-op consultation at the vet’s prior to losing his bollocks. He’s a violent little psycho anyway so less testosterone is probably a good thing.
I hear a noise from under the stairs! What is it, I wonder? Ah, it is the Platter of Splatter ™ trying to inform me that it has received a new offering! Today we will pass a critical ear over the latest release from Italy’s Experimental Industrialists Blu Mamuth, which is called “Ka Ora!”. I had not heard of Blu Mamuth before, so I did a bit of digging, and it turns out I hadn’t heard of them before because “Ka Ora!” is their debut album, and that V and Z were collaborators in Zirkus der Zeit previously.
How the fuck do I describe the sonic Armageddon that I have just listened to?
Imagine, if you please, the Poppy, spitting New Wave of Toyah, the smoky and sensual vocals of Siouxsie Sioux and the innate cold sexiness of the likes of Xmal Deutschland, the power and emotion of Cold In Berlin’s Maya Berlin being crossed with the idiosyncratic vocal delivery of Caro from Grendel’s Syster. Synthwave breaks, Futurepop, Aggrotech and Electronic Industrial are slammed together at impossible velocities, cold-welding themselves with the misanthropic alienation of Trent Reznor at his most drug addled. Add to this the aggressiveness of Combichrist and Psyclon Nine and you get something approximating what I have just listened to, although there is much much more to them than a list of influences that Dark Juan can hear in their music. It is fair to say that Blu Mamuth are as unique as say, VNV Nation or Ladytron, but nothing LIKE them at all.
I don’t want to discuss individual tracks on this album because I feel it works better as an overarching concept rather than a collection of pieces – there is an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia on this album. Barely contained violence vies with filthy, aggressive sexuality and dancers high as fuck on Dexedrine, Adrenochrome and Amphetamine spasmodically jerk like demented marionettes on the harshly strobe-lit dancefloors of my imagination, compelled to dance until their speeding hearts give out, the harsh buzz of extreme Electronica shot through with coloured shards of melody and beauty , poking through the carapace of shrieking Electronic noise and the stench of ozone mixed with human sweat and burning insulation permeates the senses while you hearing is pummelled and you feel yourself weakening under an endless sonic barrage from which there is no escape. However, you’re trapped there because you WANT to be and this is the way you want your life to end, crushed under coruscating waves of sound that never let up their assault upon your senses. So, you grasp your bottle of absinthe, down another burning, aniseed slug of it and stand, walking jerkily towards the epicentre of the sound, knowing that’s where you belong, crushed down to musical Neutronium in the black heart of the sonic singularity that is Blu Mamuth.
That’s how this album makes me feel. It’s a staggeringly uncompromising piece of work that uses voice as another instrument and fuses tribal sounds with grim and nasty Electronic Industrial music in a musical tapestry that is rich, complex and very very lush indeed. Some Electronic genres, Futurepop especially, can tend to be a bit… lightweight in production value, or very sparse in their instrumentation. This is not the case with Blu Mamuth, who clearly don’t give two fucks about the maxim “Less is more.” No, instead they have taken the same approach as a Phil Spector production and opted for an all-encompassing, shocking wall of sound that is fucking painful to listen to at times at high volume, simply because the dense quality of the music is so very overpowering.
The lyrics on the songs focus themselves on exploring themes of shedding social masks and reconnecting with the raw, animalistic core of human nature. Raw is the key word here, for it exemplifies the sound of this album – for all it is primarily Electronic-based, it’s rawer than the nerve-endings of a freshly-flayed heretic in the grip of the Inquisition. And screams louder too. It is a visceral, scarlet-spattered journey into the animalistic, the lizard brain, the inhumanity of humankind when stimulated in the right fashion. Everyone has the capability for murder. Blu Mamuth is the sound of the storm in the head of the unhinged.
And that is why I fucking love them now. I like challenging music to listen to, and Blu Mamuth have tested my resilience massively, and nearly broke me (the harshness, the buzzing and the mechanical grinding of the Electronics and machine press-like tempo on ‘Orologi’ being a major case in point). But I persevered, and with “Ka Ora!”we have a record that is as much torture as it is entertainment and I am fucking DOWN with that, because Dark Juan loves aggression, ultraviolence and having his brains cudgelled to mush by music.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (Il sistema brevettato di classificazione degli schizzi di sangue di Dark Juan, per i miei cari amici italiani. Ma sul serio, cosa CAZZO c’è che non va in voi? Vivi in paradiso, eppure le tue scene di musica industriale e gotica sono più oscure dell’interno del mio guardaroba. Non fraintendermi, lo adoro dannatamente, ma tu sei la terra del sole, del vino e delle belle donne! Perché c’è un tale ventre di violenza e aggressività nella musica?) awards Blu Mamuth 10/10 for a record that is among the absolute best Industrial albums Dark Juan has ever heard!
TRACKLISTING:
01. Redo
02. Golem
03. Smetterling
04. Hunter
05. Piccolo
06. Cromlech
07. Orologi
08. Metropolis
09. Ultima
LINE-UP:
V and Z. That’s all I have. I’m afraid of them. I don’t care if it breaks the rules of Ever-Metal.com, I’m not approaching them for more information. Those fuckers are ARMED and they are dangerous.
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
