KINSKI

After wrestling with a more listener-friendly Hard Rock style on their previous outing ("Cosy Moments", 2013), Kinski gets the formula right in their latest-to-date album "7 (or 8)", so named because apparently no one could unravel the band's convoluted discography (**).

This set follows the same headbanging trend as its predecessor, but seems to have been galvanized by a renewed sense of self-confidence and musical cool: the latter reflected in the cover portrait of indie screen idols John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, with no mention of a band name or album title.

There's a higher percentage of instrumental tracks too: a good sign that the quartet hasn't sold out yet, despite the more elemental songwriting. Further reassurance can be heard in the album closer "Bulletin of the International String Figure Association": a slow-burn anthem clocking in at one-second shy of twelve full minutes, and refining the usual twin-guitar blitzkrieg with oscillators, synth textures, and pianos (unplugged Grand and electric Fender Rhodes).

This one track is enough to justify the band's continued presence on this site, but not as Psychedelic/Space Rock anymore. File the new album under Heavy Prog instead, and I do mean Heavy: what it lacks in scope it gains in concentrated energy, aggression, and spiffed-up garage band enthusiasm.

(** The full list includes official LP's, self-released limited editions, and split-albums shared with likeminded noisemakers such as Bardo Pond and Acid Mothers Temple. I'm guessing the 2004 album "Don't Climb On and Take the Holy Water", recorded under the pseudonym Herzog while the band was between drummers, is the missing piece of the numerical puzzle)

Listening to Kinski's year 2013 album might leave you wondering what the heck this band is doing on a Progressive Rock website. They may have started life as a more experimental psych-rock ensemble, but clearly that agenda has shifted in recent years, coinciding with a change of record label prior to this session.

It was the quartet's first album after a five-year silence, and found the band playing shorter, harder songs, precision-tooled for local Seattle kids looking for a noisy afterparty. Some of the music is incredibly catchy: "Last Day on Earth"; "Conflict Free Diamonds"; "Skim MILF" (another in a series of hilarious Kinski song titles); and so forth. Add Pete Shelley's adenoidal voice to any of the above and you might find something resembling a long-lost Buzzcocks single.

But the few instrumental tracks work best, and show the lingering influence of the band's Krautrock adolescence. Note the convincing motorik rhythm under "A Little Ticker Tape Never Hurt Anybody", and again in "We Think She's a Nurse" (...quoting Brian Eno, "repetition is a form of change")

The album might have been a natural progression from their previous "Down Below It's Chaos" (2007), but that doesn't make it Prog. Two stars (at best), from a Progressive Rock point-of-view, but three (or more) on an Ass-Kicking scale, especially when played loud enough to rattle your sub-woofers.

The sixth official Kinski album (in a somewhat confusing discography) was a transitional effort, moving away from the underground Psych-Rock of earlier recordings toward the more streamlined riffs of the band's later releases on the Kill Rock Stars record label. But in no way did the added structure compromise their music, which still sounded like an attempt to effect the greatest impact with the fewest possible chords, most of them played very loud.

Look at photos of the group and you'll see a quartet of musicians well past the first bloom of youth, but don't worry: they play like a much younger band. Proto-Punk guitar thrashes dominate, with a higher percentage of actual songs this time around, including the grungy ersatz title track, "Dayroom at Narita Int'l", no doubt the source behind the memorable NME blurb comparing the album to "Sabbath in a washing machine during a power surge".

We're a long way from anything like Progressive Rock, in other words, despite the evident brains behind the music, and several unexpected digressions. Note the savage guitar freakout at the climax of "Passwords & Alcohol"; the subtle flute embellishments introducing an otherwise raucous "Boy, Was I Mad!", and the oddly mutated rhythm driving "Child Had to Catch a Train", with an extra beat subjoining each meter.

They aren't really a Space Rock outfit either, although the album's brooding five-star finale "Silent Biker Type" comes close. The long instrumental track works like a bridge across time from counterculture Germany to post-millennial Seattle, in just over nine hypnotic minutes reaffirming an obvious Krautrock influence, absorbed like a xenomorph spore at close to genetic levels.

It's a powerful end to an already muscular album, and a reminder of the hidden strength often lurking behind an unassuming moment of musical repose.

Studio album number three from the coolest band in the Pacific Northwest is arguably their best, especially for new listeners open to a creative blend of Eno-inspired ambient nuance and grungy Post Rock noise. This is a group capable of making beautiful music when necessary, but their default position is Loud.

That dynamic contrast is exploited right from the start, in the almost ten-minute album opener "Steve's Basement": a powerful Sludge Rock anthem building a furious head of fuzzed-out guitar steam from a single throbbing bass line and a sympathetic drone. The relative subtlety and restraint of the even longer "Schedule For Using Pillows & Beanbags" (the hilarious song titles are a Kinski signature) likewise yields to an imminent Krautrock frenzy, cued by a drummer with enough discipline and precision to make the ghost of Klaus Dinger turn green with envy.

The only vocals on the album are a few barely audible spoken words from bass player Lucy Atkinson, in the aptly-named punk thrash "Rhode Island Freakout". It's hard to believe the same band (and on the same album) was also responsible for the meditative calm of "I Think I Blew It", and its bookend epilogue "I Think I Blew It (Again)": two matching postcards from Another Green World.

Progressive Rock it ain't, by any definition. But the album still rocks, in a transcendent fashion: often heavy, occasionally not, and with a subversive authority only achieved by veteran rebels.

One of the occasional detours in the greater Kinski discography is an unbroken improvisation exploring the more abstract, ambient side of a sometimes very loud guitar band: 39-continuous minutes of near subliminal tones and drones with no melody, no rhythm, and no apparent form beyond its own amorphous drift.

It's hard to even guess how these sounds were generated...by synthesizers? Guitars? Stray radio interference..? Press the play button, and suddenly we're back in divided Berlin circa 1970, absorbing the noises created by a generation of artists who rejected traditional instruments and arrangements.

At least all the humming and buzzing was organized into complimentary harmonic keys, putting a soothing aura on difficult music resembling the ghostly aftermath of an unspecified industrial accident. At one point an actual (muted) guitar gently condenses out of the ice-cold air, but it's a short-lived moment of grace before the machine kicks abruptly back in gear. The final quarter of the piece is essentially a single inorganic resonance, fading slowly out over 11+ minutes.

Play it loud enough and the album can wreck your mind. But turning the volume down can make it even more insidious. While listening to it for the first time, I mistook the sound of a train passing in the distance as part of the performance: living proof of Brian Eno's theory that ambient music should merge imperceptibly with its environment

The CD was part of the so-called "Modern Containment" subscription series released by Three Lobed Recordings, a small psychedelic record label "largely operated by cats", according to their Bandcamp page. Only 550 physical copies of the album were ever pressed, but you can still hear it on-line, appropriately for music seemingly untouched by human hands.

When a quartet named Kinski loses its drummer, it makes perfect sense (at least to cinema buffs) that the remaining trio would continue to gig under the provisional alias 'Herzog'. The pseudonym was a nod of course to film director Werner Herzog, frequently at odds with his leading man of five features, the maniacal Klaus Kinski.

"I had to domesticate the wild beast", Herzog once said about the actor he named "my best fiend". And in musical terms that's not a bad analogy for this 2004 album: a collection of brief studio doodles bracketing a long, concert improvisation, all played without the impetus and punch of a full rhythm section.

The playful album and track titles ("Bulky Knit Cheerleader Sweater" being the standout, in a manner of speaking) are all Dada non-sequiturs typical of Post Rock. But the music itself, minus the relentless drive of other Kinski efforts, is pure Krautrock minimalism filtered through a sieve of Pacific Northwest Grunge: an ideal blend for musicians who sculpt their sounds instead of compose them.

The stunted handful of shorter tracks, possibly included to pad an abbreviated EP to full album length, are little more than formless (some would say aimless) rehearsal jams, hardly long enough to have any sort of impact. Which leaves the centerpiece of the collection, "The Misprint in the Gutenberg Print Shop": a modest ambient drone-fest dragged out beyond 29-minutes, in spirit recalling early TANGERINE DREAM circa "Alpha Centauri", but leaning harder on electric guitar textures.

The long track, recorded live, ends in several minutes of near-subliminal tranquility, broken finally by an excited "Fuck, yeah!!" shouted from the back of the room (it sounds like appreciation, but might have been relief). Your own reaction may not be quite so enthusiastic, but give the music time to grow on you.

I suspect the band, under whatever name they choose to play, would agree with the famous Werner Herzog observation that "civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness". What you'll hear in this set could be the soundtrack to that maxim, but with a little patience and lot of replays you might find the pearl at the bottom of the abyss.

Any fan of Neuer Deutscher Film will take notice of a band name-checking Klaus Kinski. And be thrilled to find that their music, like the volatile actor himself, is equally enigmatic, unpredictable, often violent, and sometimes surprisingly beautiful.

The Seattle-based quartet is currently listed in these Archives as a Psychedelic/Space Rock group, but that's only a (minor) slice of their full musical spectrum. Other elements are more conspicuous: Post Rock noise; west coast Grunge (hardly unexpected, given their home town); Krautrock repetition. In other words, nothing remotely like what we all recognize (but have trouble defining) as Progressive Rock.

The band's mostly instrumental second album is an exercise in opposition, contrasting moments of distorted twin-guitar fury with interludes of uneasy ambient calm. The opening "Space Launch for Frenchie" (the goofy title is a Post Rock trait shared with their kindred spirits in MOGWAI) balances relaxing atmospherics against some oddly unsettling guitar reverb, ebbing and flowing directly into the majestic fuzzed-out anthem "New India".

Which in turn brilliantly sets up "Newport", the only true song on the album: a noose-tight dynamo of post-NEU! motorik propulsion designed to worm its way under your skin. Note the evocative film-noir lyrics, so terse they're worth quoting in full:

Run / To the beach house

Stay there / 'Til you get my phone call

Lie low / Don't do anything

If we get out of this mess / It'll be a godsend

Call me a philistine, but I think it's brilliant. And that same brevity of expression is reflected in the music throughout the album. One chord is usually sufficient to carry any given track; often a single note is enough to prove the (very German) idea that complexity isn't always required to make a powerful noise.

The album ends (in "Montgomery") on the same atypical mood it began with: wrapped in a warm blanket of quietly reverberating guitar arpeggios, gently hung from a simple melodic hook. For a band described elsewhere in the music press as sounding "like Sabbath in a washing machine during a power surge", the final notes leave a strange, savory aftertaste.

Three-plus stars, rounded up.

This may sound harsh but it's the real truth for myself:

Why in the hell and earth I insist in listen to Post-Rock?...

Most of the time there's not a single note appealing to me, there's no memorable melodies, there's no concrete work. Just a bunch of jams that never go anywhere. And most of this bands doesn't even have great instrumentists. This is exactly the case of the North American band Kinski in their 4th album Don't Climb On And Take The Holy Water (2004).

The album is basically made of one song 'The Misprint in The Gutenberg Print Shop' that fors for inbearabble 29 minutes and then you have another 4 songs that span between 2 and 5 minutes.

If you like Post-Rock... well, maybe it's something good. But if I were you, I would just forget it.

This is an album i bought and put it at my junk pile after a listen or three. It's a very weird album. Normally I like weird albums very much and I like expiriments now and then, but not when it's just about guitar noise. Their is also lots of filler here, playing one annoying sounding distorted chord accented with bass and drums about one minute. The wives of the artie shaw is an ok piece, but not very special. It rock's, but that's about it. The party which you know will be heavy is the best piece, but it has some annoying intermissions featuring noise. The more relaxed parts like the snowy parts of scandinavia, will show you the same theme over and over again. It is boring to my taste, the theme's don't devellop somehow...

All in all not really a nice record. This albums features two things: Instrumental Rock with far too many fx on the guitar and soundscapes that isn't develloping that much. It's a shame, but one star for this one.

In "Alpine Static" we saw Kinski at their heaviest. From the Krautrock album that was "Don't Climb On And Take The Holy Water" they shifted drastically to some serious guitar-based rock. Alpine Static was like Sludge without slowness and Stoner Rock without the groovyness. It was a strange album to classify, but it was very high on energy. Alpine Static didn't showed much of their Space Rock influences (although the few psyched moments where highly enjoyable) so in August of 2007 they released "Down Below Its Chaos" which was return to their narcotic roots, but never going back to their old sounds.

What psychedelic adventures are Kinski going on next? Stoner Rock! These guys threw away any modern influences in their music and dived head-first into 70's fuzz fest. Like many Stoner Rock bands, their main influences is early Black Sabbath and on this album Kinski is no exception. The music is heavy, but groovy and never intimidating. Kinski are using vocals for the first time on this album and it fits perfectly with their new style. The vocals aren't very dominant in volume or in the songs either since there are only 3 tracks with them. The songs are very energetic and while they may lack the progressive leanings of their early albums its very fun to listen to since its easy to appreciate and hard to put down.

What's more to say? If you're a fan of bands like Witchcraft, Colour Haze, Dead Meadow and the likes then you'll find great enjoyment in Kinski's Down Below Its Chaos. Me? I would've preferred if Kinski went on to more experimental or innovative grounds like some of their previous efforts, but I don't mind them playing this kind of music since they're very good at it (although not adding anything new) and I'm also a fan of the genre. If you're not a fan or don't know what it is then feel free to give it a try.