For many months now I’ve been slowly formulating the theory that the esteemed editor of the review site that you are currently perusing has been gaslighting me by sending nothing but wave after wave of Swedish rock and metal for me to review, making me somehow believe that beyond my tiny Covid bubble that there is no new music of any worth being produced anywhere outside that fine nation (see Ave Noctum passim). However, he has now tripped himself up and restored my faith in the rest of the music available in the world with this really rather excellent Norwegian addition care of Bergen’s own Kryptograf.
Unashamedly plundering late sixties and early seventies hard rock, these young chaps who must surely be both long of hair and wide of flare commence ‘The Eldorado Spell’ with ‘Asphodel’, a number that is frankly one sweeping Hammond organ chord away from being a cover from the heyday of H.P. Lovecraft (the band, not the author) with its stripped back riffs and lo-fi production. Being a less than thorough reviewer as I am, and having decided to be uninfluenced by the PR blurb of Creative Eclipse (not a dig, just how I felt about the album), I must assume that the band is composed of four bearded and earnest young chaps who have delved deep into classic rock and decided that this is, like their bag, man! Genuinely, believe me when I say this is not a criticism, and your humble scribe who is a child of the sixties was happily shaking his long grey hair along to the excellent offerings of retro magnificence from the CD. Only adding to the throwback sound of the album is follow up ‘Cosmic Suicide’; frankly, with that title, I don’t need to describe the sound as on its own nominative determinism it must surely conjure forth an era of kaftans, tie-dyes and more than a small waft of THC fumes rolling forth from a stage?
By the time ‘Creeping Willow’ stamps forth from the speakers, the age of love and peace has been reluctantly left behind, and the proto-occult rock sound of Black Widow infuses every note, the aggressive thrust of the music being counterpointed by the acoustic simplicity of follow up ‘Across The Creek’, summoning forth as it does the rustic idyll of ’s Bron-Yr-Aur. Worry not though lovers of all things both “Prog” and “Rock” as the following title track ‘The Eldorado Spell’ gets its freak on, and I can only imagine that if the band found a wormhole back to the seventies that “Whispering” Bob Harris would have been waxing lyrical about their exceptional qualities on The Old Grey Whistle Test in between introducing sets by Link Wray and Hawkwind, all the while offering due regard to the hard edged Budgie bludgeoning that beefs up the delivery of ‘The Spiral’. By comparison ‘When The Witches’ is a dirty bluesy drag that screams of a magnificently stoned Peter Green with its extended trippy solos; indeed, the quiet introspection of ‘Wormwood’ throws the band back to London’s West End clubs of the late sixties where earnest jazz-heads had evolved, or if you like, devolved, care of chemical experimentation into the age of Aquarius, the album closing with the Covenesque thud of ‘The Well’.
I know that I’ve been championing the retro sound of such acts as Scorpion Child and Blues Pills for many years here on Ave Noctum, and if you desire, indeed, need, the newest and most experimental of musical explorations, ‘The Eldorado Spell’ is not the album for you. However, if you simply just appreciate the sound of such acts as Graveyard, and want to fill your musical library with undeniable class, well, Kryptograf is for you. Hell, in the time it has taken me to type this review I’ve been on to their bandcamp page and ordered their first album on CD; no not “requested”, rather “bought and paid for”. If that’s not a recommendation, well, I don’t know what is.
(8.5/10 Spenny)
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