(written by Islander)
Maybe it’s because the second season of Last of Us is on my mind, but today I’m thinking of our site like a fungal node, a dense mass of nasty and nightmarish extreme metal from which creeping tendrils reach out into more remote underground territories. This imagery is on my mind because we’re about to premiere a video for a band and a song that are outside the core of our usual churning and blood-congealing musical infections, though they do have tendril-like connections to the infections we usually spotlight.
The band is kvsket (pronounced “casket”). They’re from Minnesota, they include a member of the death metal band Graveslave (that’s one tendril), and they describe themselves as “four friends who, all looking for something more outside of their former bands and projects,” concocted music they describe as sounding like, or for fans of, Deftones, Gojira, My Chemical Romance, Turnstile, and The Cure.
Those results are currently collected in an album named Patiently Awaiting Your Arrival that was released this past February. The video you’re about to see is for a song off that album named “Hot Grip“.
The 11 mostly short songs on Patiently Awaiting Your Arrival encompass a lot of musical variety, as you might guess from those FFO references above. You’ll find big burly bounding grooves, guitars that abrade like a belt-sander and glitter like needles or quiver like warped sirens, high-flying singing with a raw edge, dark gothic crooning, furious wailing yells, and nasty snarls.
Among those songs you’ll also find bleak bruisers, sinister and dissonant fretwork hallucinations, moments of forlorn poignancy, and other moments of post-punk-inspired bounce (but with raw edges and dark moods there too).
“Dance” includes a Pink Floydian solo, and “Rube Goldberg” gets you a bone-grinding bass and sax-like instrumental freakouts along with equally wild vocals that burst into screaming range, while “Date Night Kicks” is part steamroller, part pile-driver, and part lysergic acid spectacle, and closer “All This Talking” combines enormous lo-tone throbs, ruinously roiling riffage, drumming that sounds like avalanche boulders coming down, and choral voices.
Which brings us to “Hot Grip“. Like the other songs on the album, it features bone-bruising bass lines and neck-snapping beats, but also weirdly pulsating guitar notes that sound like a warning, and vocals right on the edge of coming apart at the larynx seams.
There’s an hallucinatory aspect to this song as well as the distressing tension it torques up, a haunting vision augmented by long wails and wolfish howls, though even then the rhythmic interplay remains a muscle-mover.
The destabilizing video lets us see the performers doing their thing, including lead vocalist Johnny tearing himself apart from the inside out.
KVSKET is:
Andy – Drums, Vox
Mike – Bass, Vox
Roman – Guitar, Vox
Johnny – Lead Vox
The video was filmed by Chaz, and edited by Roman and Johnny. All songs on kvsket‘s debut album were mixed and mastered by Mike and Roman. You can stream and download the album via the links below.
DOWNLOAD/STREAM:
https://kvsket.bandcamp.com/album/patiently-awaiting-your-arrival
https://open.spotify.com/artist/4A0gDjWomREB8wrFJsiGfo
FOLLOW KVASKET:
https://www.instagram.com/kvsket_official
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61573175788081