First port of call before getting stuck in to the 2nd album from this Czech band was finding and reading the short novel they had “found their own meaning” within the pages of and interpreted it as narrative inspiration for this release. A couple of hours later it was devoured and I was left with a strange and somewhat disconcerting vision of a utopian, post-apocalyptic society called the iDEATH where the sun changes colour on a daily basis and its inhabitants attempt to survive in a peaceful and ideological way. ‘In Watermelon Sugar’ was written in the 60’s by beat poet and author Richard Brautigan in San Francisco. He led a traumatic life which took from childhood poverty to minor criminality, mental health problems, electro-shock therapy, depression and alcoholism until he unsurprisingly left the world via self-induced .44 Magnum blast to the head. Apparently the last thing he wrote was an accompanying note stating “messy, isn’t it?” It was, his body remained undiscovered for a month. The haunting prose of this attempt at founding an ideological society became an inspiration for many in popular culture from hippy communes to Harry Styles and the song titles and no doubt the lyrics (if they could be deciphered) of ‘We Have Proved Death’ certainly allude to it.
Utilising part of a quote from the novel ‘I am here and you are distant’ eerily builds via electronic ambient programming, guitar strums, eerie spoken word parts into blackened discord and chaos. It sets the template for this pretty furious and absorbing 6-track album which like its source material is kept short at just over half an hour’s running time. The quintet at times meander into fluttering near post-metal instrumental passages to savage blasts and rough and tumbling flurries of mania. Vocalist Zdeněk Klekner has the red mist of mania and is prone to going into hollered diatribes, growling, howling and screaming out his parts. On ‘A Lamb At False Dawn’ the drumming is a hefty backbone and drives things like a sledgehammer through a watermelon, turning it to mush and sugar which our iDeath inhabitants use as construction material (well I had to get that in). It’s manic but tempered with control and coruscating melody. Ambience is used as a bridge between tracks and next we confront ‘The Statue of Mirrors’ left over from before the apocalypse. What it is along with other relics of the past is never really explained but here it sounds as though it too is being smashed to pieces in an almost industrial sounding frenzy.
I was pleased to find lyrics within the sombre ‘Black Soundless Sugar.’ The song has tinges of DSBM about it and some jazz like bass sound reflecting the futility of it all. “Handmade Suns conjured out of thin air. Gases devouring flesh and crippling minds. Mutations lasting for centuries. The face of the landscape reshaped for millennia to come.” The description of the downfall of mankind is the band’s and not the original author but it fits perfectly alongside the strident guitar clamour and tempestuous near psychedelic frenzy of the song. Non-You is pure rage. Perhaps it reflects the passage of turmoil in the book where a disparate camp of survivors challenge the iDEATH ideals with their own brand of alcoholic nihilism. You will have to read it for yourself to make your mind up but there’s certainly devastation and ruination in the song. The title track is the final bout of obliteration, a short yet destructive culmination leaving you feeling exhausted and completely decimated by its violence.
I feel I got much more out of this combining the music with the actual source material and both have certainly left their mark. Between them Brautigan and Somniate have ultimately proved death in all its grizzly colours and one can only wonder what the author would have thought of it, sadly this is something we will never know.
(8/10 Pete Woods)
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