Do you know what it's like to split your face like a dinner plate and serve the hot, fresh sponge cake of your reverie as it oozes out of your bone tin to an impregnable stranger as so much greasy spilled lava cake dumped directly into their lap? No? Well, Berlin's Kadavar does- so shut up and listen- if you're ever in a situation where you have to divulge the full nakedness of the putrid inkwell of your subconscious to someone (in self-defense, or out of perverse wish-fulfillment, what have you), you'll at least be prepared (it's working for me at least). Kadavar traditionally plays a nostalgic blend of Led Zeppelin-worshipping guitar chords, southern-fried Lynyrd Skynyrd grooves, and Ozzy-jocking vocals that combine to form a smooth, psyched-out, mid-tempo version of Clutch with aspirations of becoming Witchcraft. They took an undercarriage-scraping approach to low-end, scuzz-bomb production and tuning on their 4th LP
Rough Times, but since their 2021 COVID response,
The Isolation Tapes, they've embarked on a meandering road to essentially chase the arc of Yes's career like a bloodhound tryign to catch a mouthful of a hare's butt fuzz- from progressive headcases to consummate pop-chart-cracking czars of an itchy electro-hook, they really pulled out the monty- a strategy that, while bearing fruit in terms of some phenomenally imaginative and often catchy forms, didn't manage to fly the group's freak flag at full mast, and therefore felt somewhat bereft of much-needed climax. That vitalness, that hot-bloodedness, that ugly urgency of
Rough Times and their earlier self-titled work is back to a gratifying degree on their latest LP
Kids Abandoning Destiny Among Vanity and Ruin, but now balanced by the more patient and elongated gaze of those later releases, a concontion of unlikely stagedressing and inspiration akin in spectacle to an all-caveman crew of the Starship Enterprise on a mission to boldly crush alien life beneath the stony mill of their wheels and start fires where there were never fires lit before. The album starts off with a satisfying stoner sludge swing in the vein of Acid King with the demonic fuzz rock aura of Electric Wizard, titled "Lies," before transitioning into a wormhole of transdimensional tempestry on the windtunnel-shaped "Heartache." "Explosions in the Sky" sounds nothing like the band it shares a name with, instead lapping at the banks of the Styx to paint a blazing rainbow of death across the troposphere, subsequently the group indulges their motorik tendances on "Stick It" an initiator of wacked-out disco-gloom that lashes out in a razor-wielding dance of bloodletting rebuke, crying with laughter as it twirls on a length of spider's silk over a bed of flames. "You Me Apocalypse" takes up the off-kilter groove of its predecessor and twists it in a slightly more harmonious and yet still creaky direction, pushing the boundaries of quixotic optimism as it leans into a somersault over the jutting mouth of a volcanic wound in the earth's flesh, a diabolical dichotomy that winds you up for the mystic pulse of "Children" as well as the thunderclap and collapse of "K.A.D.A.V.A.R." like you were a fly that landed on a spinning top with a yin and yang on it, just as it began its centripetal turn, and now you can tell your sucky bits from your cloaca, before finally finishing you off with a return to form on the absolute ripper, "Total Annihilation." Abandon whatever fate you imagined for yourself and give yourself over to the pride of desolation that Kadavar will lavish upon your meager mortal form.
