Artist: Course Over Ground (C.O.G.)
Label: Moonlee Records
Release: 2007
Runtime: 30:31
Rating: 4/5
Course Over Ground, C.O.G. for short, are a trio from Osijek (Croatia). Their album landed on the RockLine desk with a pretty hefty delay, but better late than never! The record fits snugly into the punk noise rock camp. You’ll often see the band’s name “artificially” shortened to C.O.G. for easier identification, so be careful not to mix them up with the Australian progressive rockers Cog. Interestingly, Course Over Ground formed back in 1997, and it still took them a full 10 years to push out their debut album.
These three guys don’t beat around the bush, don’t play primadonnas, don’t wait for a “second chance”. They train and pound their riffs straight out of the “primordial soup” of their souls. The self-titled debut serves up a live, raw production and thoroughly authentic, unpolished garage roar. The guitar has the right dissonant smear on the tips of its riffs, while the rattling, clanking bass line gives it a great counterweight and fills out the sound just as effectively. The rhythm section is witty, dynamic and relentlessly strikes sparks all the way through the material. It builds a solid, compact rhythmic groove, and the songs, without a shred of letting up or a hint of sophistication, run with plenty of punk fluidity and slap you around the ears with merciless noise.
On top of all that sits a half-dictated vocal that, instead of bending verses melodically, (over)shouts them and literally drowns them out! It’s noisy, with a great dose of spot-on annoyance, arrogance and the rage of its own disillusionment, which makes the charisma and power of Course Over Ground feel all too real!
Within a genre-limited and mostly well-trodden range of expression, the band doesn’t give off a feeling of creative confinement, even though they themselves list bands like Shellac, The Jesus Lizard, Fugazi and Slint as reference points. They overcome the danger of repetition and chewing what’s already been chewed with an extraordinary amount of lively, varied playing, which all three members contribute to in equal measure, with a sense of great communication and understanding between them. The chemistry is excellent, and the album sounds like it was played live. Truckers And Railroads, with its masterful stringing together of drama through a trivial riff confession, is one of the most cohesive moments that binds this trio together in expression, on this more than charming debut. Up Anchors, Down Sails, meanwhile, doesn’t hide a mild blues connotation. There’s a lot of music packed into half an hour, and the album is highly dynamic and full of contrast. One of the first such contrasts comes right between the first two tracks. The album opens with the fiercely blazing, sped-up Boombar, which is followed in contrast by the track 101. The guys kick that one off with a totally trivial mid-tempo beat in a rhythm that, at the start, is ruled only by the rattling, thick clank of the bassist’s “concreting”. Soon enough, though, it gets livened up by the shouting vocal and a out-of-tune curtain of riffs, which gives a sense of the drama in the song itself growing and underlines the feelings the band wants to express in its message.
Course Over Ground aren’t reinventing the wheel, but they offer a principle of their own that’s real and brings out a much-needed note of recognizability, in a great mix of punk mockery and noise amateurism, which they also know how to season melodically in just the right pinch. It’s only a good half hour of music, but trust me, within the spectrum of noise punk rock it rises above any sense of the generic. For fans of the genre, this album is a must-try. This time it’s not Rijeka, it’s Osijek! Great stuff.
Lineup
Majkić – vocals, guitar
Dindo – bass guitar
Antun – drums
Tracklist
1. Boombar
2. 101
3. Darryl (Tech-Marvel)
4. Argo
5. Truckers & Railroads
6. Up Anchors, Down Sails
7. These Robes Are Worn By Strangers And Stranger’s Sons
8. On Volvo
9. Queen Ann’s Revenge
