Even though we've had three distinct waves (some would say more!) of emo in the US since the start of the Twenty-First Century, its noisier, more damaged cousin (Screamo, if you couldn't tell where I was going there) continues to languish in the attic of our collective consciousness. Rarely, if ever, venturing forth from its tomb of boxed up holiday decorations and shadows in order to snatch as little as a breath of fresh, non-cobwebby, air or a scarf a snack at the 7/11. For good reason too. Paler than Gerard Way, and no longer meant to inhabit this world. If it out of its enclosure for more than a couple of minutes, and in direct sunlight, it starts to smoke like a microwavable burrito left to spin and irradiate in the nuke box for nine minutes longer than it should have. It sometimes feels like the closest thing we have to a genuine, new screamo band that can go toe-to-toe and nose-to-nose with the likes of Pg.99 or City of Caterpillar is For Your Health. But even then you're basically talking about a hardcore band who gets the vibe right. For a taste of that real old school revival stuff, you're going to have to charter a ship for the port in Kiel, Germany.
Кальк, as you may have surmised, is a Germany screamo band. For some inscrutable reason their name, and song and album titles are all written using cyrillic characters. It's doesn't really matter though. You don't have to read anything to get what this band is all about. You just have to listen. And what you'll hear is a delicious sonic buffet of hot, roiling anger, marinated in bitter disappointment. From what I can gather, most of the subject matter of the album deals with the waste and excess of capitalist production and the habits that the system forces consumers into. There also seems to be a fair amount of rage directed towards plain, old, card-carrying sexism. Which is always fine in my book. The day you can't write a song seething over disparate treatment and male entitlement, is the day that punk rock dies.
Initially, I mistook Кальк for a post-crust band, primarily due to the raspy, strained and gnashing performance that erupts out of their vocalist, as well as some of the rusty, buzz-saw riffs they use to cut through space and time and come knocking at the entrance of your ear canal. It took me a couple of listens to pick up on the heavy-hearted slam riffs and ebullient, climbing highs that the guitar melodies can reach. Heights that the songs reach after long comfortable periods where the band is just belly-gliding around like a lachrymose seal on a frozen pond of despair. It's really the manic mood twists that clued me in to what the band was going for on this album and what their influences might be. Part of the magic of Кальк is that they make these extreme transitions so smoothly, and so completely, that you'll sometimes forget that you're listening to a single song, instead of two or three that have been daisy-chained together. That is until the chorus hits, at which the backdrop of whatever dreamy detour you were on fall away and you're pulled back into the room you started in. It's a pretty good trick, and one that doesn't get old, no matter how many times they play it on you.
If I haven't made this point clear already, Кальк's Олень на вершине холма is an excellent screamo record that I would highly recommend to anyone still pining for the pang of that old school screech and holler. It's wasn't distributed in the US outside of Bandcamp, but it's worth the effort to seek it out.
