Every once in a while I like to cover a band like Sukatani. By this, I mean a band that is playing in that darkly gothic style of 3/4s post-punk and 1/4 hardcore that La Vida Es Un Mus Discos seems to exist exclusively to perpetuate- and doing it right! Usually, when I come across a band in this style, they're from Spain or South America, but Sukatani has me tracking about 10,000 miles in the opposite direction to visit them in Indonesia where I find their latest album Gelap Gempita coiled like a cobra in the catalog of local record slingers Dugtrax. Sukatani are definitely less intense than a group like Rata Negra, but have about the same level of interest in, and ability to, construct firm melodic structures. The guitar work here is fluid but jittery and unsettled, lending itself to grooves that have a lot of body and swelter to them and tend to evaporate a cold heat. The way the reverb recoils off the guitars is positively spooky, like the vapors of a shrinking block of dry-ice adrift in a tub of milk and vodka. These eerie effects bond felicitously with space-age electronics feedback in refracted cascades that ripples in brilliant interstellar arrays of blinding, fractured luminescence, like the distant observation of a photon torpedo colliding with the surface of a moon that has been particularly terraformed into an enormous discoball. The trade-off between the co-ed vocals is probably the most intoxicating part of the entire mix though, and serves as the preverbal cherry on this chilly, black velvet-tinted treat. If the lyrics weren't all in Indonesian, I think I'd be forgiven for thinking the album was a long-buried collaboration between Gary Numan and 45 Grave! Make no mistake, Gelap Gempita is cut from the kind of intrepid darkness that can really light up your life.
