(Vizzah Harri wrote what follows below. It’s best that we not spoil it by attempting any further introductory words.)
Nearly 3 months have passed since Black Tides has been released. So many things in life are timebound; news, they say, needs to be relevant, timely and fresh. Nothing refreshes more than a jump into the ocean, or smelling the salty morning breeze, I mean, 3am is morning, right?
If you don’t mind, we’re going to take a trip back in time, because that’s exactly what Kólga’s sound implores us to do. And like the evening news after an emergency, it’s best to wait until the stylus revolts unto the dead wax.
Being untethered
is the muffled sound of the amalgamated drone
of the maxed-out reverberation of residential karaoke,
the subdued bass from a nearby resto’s enervated playlist,
and the zing and whirr of the ancient soda fridge
in line with the cheap plastic fan hazing away in stereo
in the room where I act as a live experiment of entropy.
It isn’t even purgatorial procrastination and lethargy anymore.
Signals of a defeated drive. Inertial subscription to no secure path.
Directionless, doldrummed.
At the mercy of the absence of shifting air.
The inciting incident can be ascribed to what then?
Moving waves of sound.
Marching undulations sounding in concatenation, or M.U.S.I.C. for short.
We all – love it or hate it – smack tired labels on new chord progressions for easier navigation towards what we think we’d like. Sometimes this is a hindrance because there might be a brutal-softcore-sludge-crunk-vaporwave-disso-garde band out there that really hits the spot, but you saw ‘core’ in there and dare not even click on it. Aside from going obscurantic on your asses again, seeing music for what it is compared to is a form of intertextuality in itself.
‘Permutations’ – John Whitney and Jack Citron’s 1969 computer program interpreted by the percussion of Balachander
People complain about well-known streaming sites and their lackluster algorithmic propensities. Without having to name the one everyone uses – one would certainly spot (it) if I just make allusions right? – YouTube has always provided me with superb recommendations.
It’s where I happened upon sublime channels pushing tasty blackened-, dissonant-, atmospheric– and sometimes even offerings of the avant-garde persuasion. One of the coolest finds suggested by the algorithm was that of black metal surf-rock interpretations. You read that right.
When you come across a band melding together surf rock and black metal, the first thing that most people recall for reference is this song from the late great Dick Dale. Having read quite a few reviews about the album I’d like to defile your ears with today, like I always do, I found that they’re rife with surf-terminology and references to aforesaid electric guitar innovator. We jump to the easiest and most seamless connection with our big little pattern-seeking meat-sacks of electric computation. However, I cannot promise that you won’t be subjected to a few word-bombs needing a duck-dive.
I was today year’s old when I read that Dick Dale is purportedly seen as a big progenitor of the popularization of electric tremolo-picking. A search ensued for the beginnings of the technique and some side-questing to find cool links for cover songs reinterpretations (the next paragraph down bears some of the fruit).
Many people like to hate on cover music and sometimes even when they just hear that five-letter word it comes across as a curse. “Cover bands attempting to emulate and ride on the coattails of superior songwriting is a mimicry of auto-anthropophagic dimensions, a form of self-cannibalism that just reinforces the status quo that bars original music from getting space and airtime in live venues.”
There are cover bands and also tribute bands, there are cover songs on albums of a different style altogether, and then there are what can be seen as relating to the latter, but perhaps even more in the direction of reinterpretation. Every now and again, however, there’s a good cover song on an album which sometimes elevates the art into new dimensions by interpreting it in the emulator’s style.
To Illustrate; there are really good cover songs, then there is this awesomeness. Accordingly there are fvcking great cover songs that are almost godly, and then there’s the inimitable Chuck. The list is endless, but rewarding, and eventually, we get to the boss of all covers, La Folia, one of the oldest musical themes from the Occident in recollection. Basically, one of the most influential chord progressions of all time.
Ventromedian is the adjective referring to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex which processes risk and fear, as well as inhibiting emotional response. It plays a part in decision-making, self-control and the cognitive evaluation of morality. It is also the anagram of Monteverdian, relating to Claudio Monteverdi, the Italian composer, trailblazer in developing opera, and one of the first classical composers to incorporate tremolo and pizzicato (plucking strings) in his music.
One of the supposedly obsolete tremolos was that of the undulating tremolo which was used to induce a “very uncertain–undulating effect … But it must be said that, unless violinists have wholly lost the art of this particular stroke, the result is disappointing and futile in the extreme.”
Tremolo picking precedes violin tremolos though, seeing as the ancestor of the guitar, the oud, dates back to nearly 5 millennia ago. العود (al-ʿūd or oud) literally denotes a thin piece of wood shaped like a straw. Semitic linguists derived it from Syriac of which one meaning was “burning wood,” probably because it caught fire from all the crazed riffage it was subjected to. Gives a new perspective on that burning bush ey?
And to understand ecclesiastical favor towards the arts, antiquated scholars of the cloth referred to it as ūḏ, a stick used to stir bracken, wood and ashes in a fire. Here is Peter Pringle giving a rendition of one of the earliest historical accounts of literature, it’s not on an oud, but it is similar. This is an oud:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jTa_J6MetQ
If that was enough history for you, here is Beach Guardian to bring it back to the information age in trve Ouroboros fashion. Which finally brings us to what is on offer today.
‘Kólga’ is the Norse Goddess of Waves, also known as the ‘Cool-Wave’ ready to douse that fire. Kólga took one look and listen at what was on offer on the surf metal channel and decided that original blackened surf rock was something the world needed to experience. A dawn patrol commenced with the summoning of groundswell-ed, maxed-out saturnine sets slotted and carved as if the very wind would die for doldrums of an ever-morrow.
Enter Space Beach Massacre. Old-timey sci-fi B-movie theatrics open the album as a prelude for what we’re all waiting for; Dick Dale charging a massive A-framed reverb monster of stoked-out glory. There are a few blackened shrieks to remind us that this ain’t just an instrumental surf rock album, but first impressions are that any semblance of regularity in the black arts have been waylaid for radical goofy-footed carving of shore-bound electrics.
And in a way that makes Kólga the modern-day, living and breathing Jörmungandr for summoning this sonic style of blackened excesses.
The left-hand path leads down darkened groves to that of Big Sur. Prising open a box filled with wonders both imagined and containing some essence of the dark matter that suffuses all. Dallas, Texas might already have known of this band since 2018 as per their social media and the video below, but Black Tides only surfaced as an album this year.
The same uploader also has a great live video of Haunter’s Dispossessed phrenic antiquity
Squall of Cthulhu is perhaps the track with the most potential to push you off-balance. Rumbling in with party wave percussion aesthetics, the song flats out as a spring tide lull of tide-pushed flow immerses the experience before bubbling over again into psyched march speed. It’s eventually like if you hailed the spirit noir with just a refining touch of Cascadian atmospherics to distract trained ears from this album’s solid grounding in that supra-liminal reality of that which shorelines signify.
Fractal in its minutiae of what should be deemed genre or canon, with one foot firmly in the shallows across that malleable and constantly morphing line of what a seaboard truly represents, and the other in the deeps abreast the submerged cliff that drops off steeply from the plane of convention.
Zithering in with meditative splendor, Tethys, along with some of the other voice-over/samples found on the album is a jibe at ASMR meditation videos and burning man psychonaut cults in its introduction. Something that one realizes only three tracks in is that even though Kólga are trying really hard to come across as some gimmick/parody/joke band, they’re failing miserably, because the music is heartfelt and there is genuine talent lurking in this lagoon – impatiently set to strike.
The atmosphere and understanding of tone and composition here reminds one of Spaceslug’s amazing Eye the Tide (and aptly titled for this review’s purposes, their new album Out of Water just got released and deserves a writeup of its own).
Doubling-up on atmosphere and the use of keys, this song ends up being a sonic manifestation of what that slowing of time could feel like when in the green room of the tube just before your board gets snagged for the inevitable trip over the falls into the cosmic washing machine.
With song titles like Riptide and Endless Bummer, one might question how serious these musicians really are. Well, luckily Kólga have got you covered by following those fantastically named tracks with “Is This Real?”
Black Tides might fall more into the metal-adjacent box than a full-on mashup, with the blackened charry bits being more of a side offering. It delivers less of a chokehold than a siren call seducing you to remain hooked until the 7th wave in the set of The Kraken. The most metal track on this record by a few fathoms took a synth bath, sped up the Dale worship to double-time, and conjured a wall of sonic foam to wash clear all ideations of worry away.
We’re not a publication that cares for ratings, but if you asked me, I’d say Kowabunga dude! This blackened psych-tastic record hangs ten and slays!
P.S. Kólga includes current/former members of Dead To A Dying World, Sabbath Assembly, Wrekmeister Harmonies, and more.
https://www.facebook.com/hangtentacle/
https://www.instagram.com/svrfs_vp/
https://kolga.bandcamp.com