This is an album that lends itself to exaggeration: explosively mashing up genre tags (say, tribe-thrash electro-garage), or vividly illustrating scenes (sweatily rocking out in a divey club with linoleum floors and wood paneling in the middle of winter while wearing snow boots). But all that nonsense would miss the point, which is that the newest from MPLS’s Skoal Kodiak simply rocks – a heavy and supergroovy outgrowth of mutant songwriting.
The tunes are musically sparse but rhythmically heavy, usually bedding both live drums and rhythmic electronic patterns beneath synth lines that run from jagged Suicide angularity to all-out squalls. The screamed and growled vocals are run through a homemade circuit-bent mic that bitcrushes, distorts, and grinds them up, smearing crazed, Cubist walls of sound across the bombastic rhythm section.
Every song on the album is fantastic, so I suggest listening to the tracks in this order –
1) Teapot
2) Hollidazzle
3) Pinomage
4) Sciswell
5) Sciswell
6) The Borrower
7) Tomah Triangle
8) Asstral Assassin
Yes, this is the original track listing. The whole thing is deliciously, crushingly irreverent, tossed off so perfectly that you can’t mess with it.
