«Kontora Kooka» – «Lo-End» album review
In the last result, Zappa’s dictum it isn’t too exact, because when music to discuss is an aggregate of habitual elements, habitual words to describe it appear eventually. But you can do nothing, if somebody begins to press habitual «buttons» in unusual way, and sound can’t be really classified. This is No-Wave, and it’s crazy… a little bit.
Strange lacerated guitar sound with the unpredictable accompaniment of childish prattles, squeaks, accordion, piano, synth keyboards, artistic and like a little bored Kook’s vocals, powerful and quite odd atmosphere of the album – that’s what is waiting for a listener on «Lo-End», the new CD of the band called «Kontora Kooka» from Samara. It’s the music which maybe will burst into your head like the stream of pure consciousness and existential déjà vu, and maybe will not find any response at all, but you’ll remember this sound and you can scarcely mess it up.
Lyrics perfectly harmonize with the sound. It looks like a kit of words on the face of it, but every line carries some image, vision, like slide or frame, or a piece of puzzle. You construct the whole image in your own mind, by yourself, and this is you who should define what it will be for you – an absurd picture or a reverberation of the world around you.
«Lo-End» is foremost interesting, original and high quality sound. It can surprise listener and stay in his memory. It’s the acoustical phenomenon which not really often occurs nowadays.
Grade: 8/10
Nikolay ‘Tacitus’ Polyakov
«Grave Jibes Fanzine»
