Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Broken Lock
Label: ZARŠ Records
Released: 2015
Running time: 33:43
Rating: 4/5
Broken Lock, the long-lived snarlers from Črnomelj in Bela krajina, are back on the scene with their new, and fourth overall, studio album, »Unicorns We All Chase«. The band has been around for twenty years, and on the new record they once again lean on constant transformation of style and sound, delivering it in a way that’s totally their own and one of a kind. So with »Unicorns We All Chase« Broken Lock remain absolute rock oddballs, not just on Slovenian soil but on the wider, practically global stage. And that’s the essence of any form of expression in any kind of art. It seems Broken Lock hit one of the key requirements for healthy, meaning evolutionarily genuine, musical artistry with ease, whatever band in this galaxy you’re talking about.
If its predecessor “Want to Exit This Ergastulum?” was markedly experimental, and the word crossover often fit the vibes that record radiated, the new album sees the band fleetingly flirting with its beginnings again, with its roots. That doesn’t mean they’re manically digging through dusty archives of ideas to re-create bygone days. The album just gives off that feeling thanks to the deliberate trimming and pruning of the arrangements into sensibly rounded, compact tracks that once again focus on a plasma of bigger decibel release. At times caustically thundering, devoted to melting together many feelings of dystopia and alienation, which are breathed into life and given sense by a vocal performance that would sit just as nicely in post-grunge territory.
That’s why the new album, in a very likable, unobtrusive and unconscious way, recalls the band’s first steps, when they were still creating in the original niches of stoner rock and hardcore. Thanks to those trimmed arrangements. Even so, the premise of experimental provocation is clearly perceptible throughout, and the band stuns with a unique sonic backdrop of an extremely meaty and unusual musical conglomerate, where elements of sludge and mathcore also keep shaking hands in a remarkably conciliatory dialogue. The rhythms are constantly broken, the sound is destructively pissed off, and the guitar riffs, in a mildly metal, post-thrash-ed sphere, roar and sneer the whole way through and dish out a bellyful of satisfying aggression, with a restrained touch of garage grime and stoner stubbornness. No wonder that Broken Lock, in their strange musical footwear that you can’t pin down with any tangible genre label, win over fans of bands from a wide spectrum of the genre melting pot, with similar genre elusiveness, all the way from the insane Norwegian experimentalists Shining to Mastodon, Voivod or even Alice in Chains.
On the new album the band also keeps that eternal and welcome element of unpredictably daring turns in how it delivers moods. Take the exploratory passage in Untying Knots (right after the guys ride out of the frothing riffage), where an active bass line takes over the massive riff scaffolding, after the guitars suddenly lie low and simply contrast the soundscape with »clean« chords, over a rhythmic key that in some other musical story could even stylistically get along with those dubby oddballs from Obsotelje called Dubzilla. It’s precisely in such moments of mood-and-expression duality, where softer passages happily hang out with the metal-pissed ones, that the quartet shows an extremely mature sense of musical arrangement.
»Unicorns We All Chase« is an excellent new album from Broken Lock. In its own »weirdness« it never stops unsettling you. It brewed for a long time again, ripened ideally in terms of ideas, and so once more delivers a work that’s genre-indefinable, unmanageable, and at the same time seriously provocative. With this album the band confirms once again that its basic engine of self-evolution keeps running, that untamed inner core striving for endless expressive metamorphosis, which is why »Unicorns We All Chase« is an album with a completely individual musical nature and a clearly crafted art character, a homegrown musical vision as the band freely commands and follows it.
Lineup
Rihard Zupančič – vocals, guitar
Janez Weiss – vocals, guitar
Marko Bradica – bass guitar
Julij Karin – drums
Jure Vlahovič – sound effects
Production
Jure Vlahovič & Broken Lock
Track list
1. Big Debt (04:34)
2. Untying Knots (05:56)
3. Mass-Produced Unicorns (04:24)
4. Affordable and Sustainable Future (03:06)
5. Gnawing Bones with Golden Teeth (06:16)
6. Mother Monolith (05:13)
7. Black Reign (04:01)
