KERRETTA (Nowa Zelandia). To pochodzące z Kingsland trio na pierwszy rzut oka bardzo łatwo kwalifikuje się do szufladki z napisem "post-rock". Jednakże po dokładniejszych oględzinach okazuje się, że dzieje się tutaj znacznie więcej. Fascynacje takimi formacjami jak Explosions in the Sky czy Mogwai są dość oczywiste, ale słychać tu również inspiracje połamanym, ale jednocześnie perwersyjnie melodyjnym amerykańskim rockiem niezależnym spod znaku Slint czy Battles. Na najnowszej płycie - Saansilo - dodatkowo sięgają po instrumentarium nie mogące bezpośrednio kojarzyć się z dowolną odmianą rocka. Ich muzyka jest piękna i niebezpieczna zarazem. Dumnie reprezentują barwy doskonałej wytwórni Golden Antenna. Mają za sobą koncerty w USA i Europie, a ich koncerty w Bytomiu i Krakowie będą ich polskim debiutem. Zapraszamy na to świetne ciężkie granie, na przełamanie lodów!

When you march your barbarian horde through the streets of a fallen city, atop a fifteen hands high silver wildebeest (using their horns as handles), laser beams sparkling and shimmering over the smoking battlefields, a thousand million pearlescent snakes coiling slowly through the dead city streets, tiny unicorns cowering in their cages, A Ways to Uprise, the first single from Kerretta's sophomore album Saansilo, will be your soundtrack.

Spawned from the dark and forbidding streets of Kingsland, New Zealand, Kerretta are the mutant three headed progeny joined in an unholy matrimony. Their debut album Vilayer was one of the highlights of 2009, gaining praise and glory from fans and critics alike across the globe. In New Zealand it was nominated for the inaugural Taite Music Prize, an honour similar to being nominated for a Mercury prize in the UK. They toured the USA in 2010 and have supported a host of bands both here and abroad, including Jakob, Explosions In The Sky, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, and ex-Dead Moon folks Poison Arrows. At their 2010 SXSW performance, a dedicated and determined crowd braved the freak (and to be frank, quite sinister) arctic winds, that tore through the open-air venue with hurricane force, to stand transfixed (yet shivering in the night), bearing witness to the might and majesty that is the Kerretta live show. Giving a cold shoulder, stony eyed glare and a quiet [expletive deleted] hissed under their collective breath at the outmoded idea that all bands need lead vocalists, Kerretta revel in their lack thereof and pursue, with steadfast glee, the ins and the outs, the ups and the downs of a purely sonic narrative. A narrative that is heavy and dark, twisted with shards of beauty and danger all sitting securely on top of a churning slow burn groove that's fatter than a police line-up of bison.

Recorded over 2010/2011 Saansilo is a progression from Vilayer; keeping all those elements that worked so well on the first album - the heaviness, the volume, the unrelenting atmosphere of unholy and inhuman despair - and adding adventurous use of instrumentation and surprising (and very effective) changes in mood and texture. Lets have a quick run down of the songs shall we? After the intro of the aforementioned A Ways To Uprise the second song, Halls To Wherever, continues with the themes of battle and slowmotion dismemberment, introduced by a soaring pointillist guitar, setting the mood quite nicely, before the bulldozer-like riffage comes crashing down. Epic is the word. Track three - Bloodlines - sees the band speeding down the autobahn astride giant metal birds constructed of chrome and wood with wheels grafted where their talons would normally be. Out of nowhere comes a battalion of Cook Island drummers. Mayhem ensues. Clinical tests have demonstrated that listening to track four - By The Throats - unrelenting primal pulse stirs up such unrelenting berserker ferocity that if listened to prior to sports matches, teams will likely never lose a game again. Track five, Shepherds Thread, is like a dinner party but with explosions, giant psychedelic squid and lots of glowing neon dots. We are heading into the hinterlands with penultimate track Kept From The Brilliance Of The Outer World. Four ragged cyborg warriors stand silhouetted on a barren mesa readying to do battle as the sun sets over a dying world. Is that rain or is it blood? If you have a penultimate track then you obviously must have an ultimate track and that track is.... Onyxia. The way I see it, it is about three kids finding a strange old machine in a basement. A friend's grandpa explains that it's probably a motor and would make a spiffy addition to the go-cart they are building. The boys excitedly scrounge around second hand shops and musty garages, finding parts to make their new acquisition work again. After installing the machine in their yellow and red go-cart they discover, to their horror, that it is not a motor after all but an ancient mystical doomsday device built to summon a couple of particularly nasty Elder Gods. On the day of the big race the Elder Gods rise up out of the oceans destroying everything in their path.

Oops. Of course, you might have a different interpretation.

Alan Holt

July 1st 2011