Artist: Aluk Todolo
Label: Ajna Offensive
Released: 2012
Length: 84:39
Rating: 4.4/5
If I call the French underground scene insane, I don’t think anyone will argue. If I call it innovative, I’ll pick up a few more votes of support. And if I wrap up by saying the French underground scene is, all in all, insanely innovative, I’ll probably have drawn exactly the right conclusions. In the 21st century, it’s mostly the bands trying to discover new musical forms (and thereby stay genre-less) while also hunting for the right name for their new genre that have pushed scene borders into worldwide recognition. Aluk Todolo, especially with Occult Rock, come from a long line of this kind of accelerating train, whose engine drivers, at least in sonic resemblance, are probably Alcest, one of the first bands (if not the first) to breathe life into the term blackgaze, a style that takes elements of (post-)black metal and shoegaze and presents them in a completely new light that looks incompatible at first glance (though not to the ears). Aluk Todolo do something similar, only they swap the shoegaze for a genre the scene may have somewhat forgotten – krautrock.
That’s actually really interesting. Krautrock is, by itself, an insanely varied genre (even though, ironically, repetition is its trademark). Mostly because it takes in so many approaches, stylistic nuances, experimental contradictions and other peculiar bursts of creative inspiration that with the slightest bit of experimenting you can get lost inside it without any trouble, to the point where the abstractness of the final product swallows you whole and tramples you under its feet – which can of course lead to incredible masterpieces, or just to a truly pathetic random sequence of wrong-sounding noises. But Aluk Todolo are black metallers at heart, and from krautrock they pick the rawest ingredients for their own simple brutality. They take that krautrock-specific repetitiveness, that personified experimentalism, which doesn’t mean merely repeating certain phrases but something closer to a ritual, a mantra, serving to build this one-of-a-kind atmosphere, this transcendental technique of using sound to work on the listener’s neuropsychological self. Aluk Todolo, of course, add darkness, dread, atonality, dissonance – everything you can associate with intelligent, exploratory black metal that goes beyond its original cliché.
For the band, Occult Rock is the peak of polishing this kind of musical expression. With this album they perfected all 666 quotas of incredibly dark and disharmonic-sounding tonal sequences and chords, perfected every space with complex rhythmic patterns, and, judging by the reaction of the wider music crowd, they finally justified their intentions and achieved their goals.
The album Occult Rock is thus without a doubt one of the hugely important turning points on the modern underground scene. You might not like it (even probably), you might hate it, you’ll definitely have some ear trouble. But – if you hold out through enough listening time, sooner or later a portal will open for you to that same transcendence the krautrockers reached in the 70s of the last century. Aluk Todolo pull it off without drugs, tried and tested. The trio won’t dictate any lofty (or worn-out) life philosophies to you, since they have no lyrics, but that’s exactly why they offer you a higher-value experience, one that through its abstraction only you can finally unravel. That once again resembles the very principle of krautrock in its golden years, which Aluk Todolo implement so skillfully in their dark tune.
So eat your hearts out, conservative pseudo-connoisseurs and music anti-modernists. Music as an art form, viewed apart from social currents (i.e. the rot of the music industry), is stronger and more innovative than ever (maybe because it has to be). With Occult Rock, Aluk Todolo are proof of exactly that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-UB4ApsJe0
Lineup
Shantidas Riedacker- guitar
Antoine Hadjioannou – drums
Matthieu Canaguier – bass guitar
Tracklist
1. I 10:13
2. II 10:32
3. III 10:07
4. IV 12:05
5. V 11:16
6. VI 8:36
7. VII 10:04
8. VIII 11:45
