Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Nikki Louder
Label: ZARŠ Records
Release: 2015
Rating: 3/5
The fourth album from Kamnik’s sonic terrorists Nikki Louder brings enough freshness that you can hear a real swerve away from what you’d roughly expect from the band. The band has put eight tracks on the new record. Instead of the expected wildness, that mix of elusive guitar noise and speeded-up rolling rhythms, they set up the opening stretch of the album in a different mood: stoned, musty and “trippy”. In the first half of the record, the band mostly builds on slowly lumbering moves, once again making smart use of plenty of oscillation, or feedback, or in plain words the »side« noise their guitar phrases throw off. The avalanche-like, hysterical sound is locked on one dimension and evokes elements of post-punk, which push to the front especially in the opening stretch. The screeching, frenetic vocals are »muffled« in the mix, shoved into the background, and work like an extra spice that breaks up the uniformity of the riffs, or lead motifs.
The album feels like an afternoon jam, if not an open rehearsal outright. No wonder. It was recorded in a single take, in the middle of a hot July day, in the middle of the cultural center in Kamnik. Played like a gig, in other words. And that feeling holds, dead serious, from the first second to the last. The band brilliantly dissolves the otherwise bizarrely simple form of the lead motif with a whole host of side seasoning in the form of squealing guitar noise, which thickens and colors the available sonic space, sails toward new untested forms and opens up new dimensions of vast noise expanses for itself. And that’s the first point of rock. Freedom, not getting squeezed into templates, dissolving templates and patterns. On the fourth album the band simply confirms it has matured in this element, which it exploits (or rather delivers) brilliantly in its musical visionary streak. Nikki Louder, guys of limited technical and formal training, deftly slalom around any genre predictability, because they don’t want to please anybody at all. That very freedom from settled “mathematical” frameworks of music is their first entry visa, and with it, in their authentic bizarreness of full-on minimalism but exceptional sonic juiciness and heart, they shock and charm any listener.
From the visionary angle, the album is a unified, compact mass of spontaneous experimenting by the trio. The band again freely surrenders to the moment of inspiration, steering itself through unexpected highs and lows of thunderous sonic waves, so the album can suddenly, quite unexpectedly, break open atmospherically, while the band doesn’t renounce its wrecked, creaky rumble, the kind that can make delicate souls’ eardrums bleed, for even a split second.
With »Trout« the band holds on to its absolutely elusive and distinctive musical character, laid down on the previous three albums, and so keeps its originality intact. With the new record they effectively lift new veils off musical expanses written in extreme forms of sonic noise, and they deliver to the scene an album that isn’t unexpected, yet once again has enough freshness, an imprint of the band’s gradual artistic and expressive development. Along a naturally charted path.
Lineup
Blaž Sever – guitar, vocals
Peter Cerar – bass, guitar
Luka Cerar – drums
Production
Blaž Flerin
Tracklist
1. Don’t Believe Your Own Bullshit
2. Courage
3. Feline Blues
4. CV
5. Para Cargo
6. Shareholder
7. Trout
8. Salsa Ass
