Welcome back to Bandcamp Buried Treasure! See? I didn't abandon you! This is for real! So let's keep kicking off 2014 with sick metal! You know the rules of the article by now:
- I hunt down awesome artists on bandcamp that have their album up for Buy It Now/Free Download and give them a write up. I'm not explicitly telling you to download the album for free since I'm a big supporter of buying your music, but I like the option for my readership to be there.
- The goal is to introduce you to smaller bands or obscure side-projects you might not have heard of. Anything to expand your musical horizons by just a little bit each week!
- And of course, for there to be a conversation about similar bands or bands you think I should be covering. I check the comments section!
Like I said last time, I switched the format up a bit with two new sections, titled "The Basic Idea" and "Why I Love It." The former is a short news-style lead that paints a vivid picture of what you're about to hear to get you interested and help you understand a little why I chose the record, while the latter serves simply as a review piece.
So who's in the mood for some seriously well-done post-rock-meets-doom metal ala Kultika?
The Basic Idea
Kultika are an interesting brand of post-metal because they don't abide by the usual droning song structures and consistent spacey sounds that inhabit the genre. Instead, the band incorporate a little doom, a little groove and even a pinch of poppier sensibilities cloaked in heavier sounds to carve out a sonic signature that's easily associated with their name and their name only.
Why I Love It
The Strange Innerdweller is an interesting listen- the songs are long, there are sections that stick to one riff for a fairly decent amount of time and there's a lot of decidedly non-post-metal sections scattered about the album. The final product of all those ingredients is something that's highly enjoyable but also interesting and fresh to hear. Just think about how many post-metal bands you've heard in the past year or so that you wouldn't be able to tell apart one from another if you were given a test. That, or even describe beyond "they sounded like Isis and The Ocean."
The reliance on building tensions and resolving them on grand scale throughout the album is minimal, and instead is replaced with creating fragile atmospheres that can drop into different types of sections on a moment's notice. That's the beauty of The Strange Innerdweller– where the genre it heavily draws from strongly utilizes the tension-and-resolution technique, the album simply takes the feelings of the tensions and crafts a light atmosphere from them. if a resolution happens to occur, great! If not, anything else could happen and the listener gets an equally enjoyable, unique experience. It's as if the album were written under a musically agnostic mantra- there might be an ultimate goal, but if there isn't we'll make it work.
I'm really interested to see where the band go next- for a debut LP The Strange Innerdweller presents not only a promising future, but a great product that's worth your time and money. So go get your kinda-post-rock on!
