Klonosphere Records / Season of Mist – 13th September 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
We’re promised ‘an unprecedented auditory experience’ and warn us to ‘Prepare to be engulfed in a sonic journey where brutal rhythms meet wild improvisations, pushing the boundaries of what metal and jazz can achieve together.’ As much as I think ‘unprecedented is a much overused word – and often as spuriously as ‘exponential’, when presented with a work which combines metal and jazz, I have to admit that there’s fairly limited precedent in what is, unquestionably, a very small field. There’s GOD, perhaps, but they were of a more industrial persuasion, in a meat grinder with heavy avant-jazz, whereas Killing Spree are dirty, dark, guttural growly metal. The pitch is that ‘Following the acclaimed release of their EP A Violent Legacy, featuring inventive covers of classics by Death and Meshuggah’, Camouflage ‘continues to showcase their unique blend of death-metal ferocity and electrifying, irreverent free jazz textures’.
Killing Spree is Matthieu Metzger (Klone, National Jazz Orchestra, Louis Sclavis, etc.) and Grégoire Galichet (Deathcode Society, Glaciation, Kwoon, Vent Debout), and it’s Metzger who brings the jazz. As we learn, his sax is heavily treated, ‘manipulated with an array of machines’ and in truth, it doesn’t sound like a saxophone for the most part. In fact, while at times it sounds like an angry three-foot hornet having a fit, it generally sounds like nothing else on earth, at least not that I’ve heard. Consequently, it doesn’t even sound particularly ‘jazz’; it’s an aggressive drone, a buzz, a deep whine.
The title track is a wild ride of what sounds like a combination of technical metal and sludgy, doomy Sabbath-esque metal and blasts its way past the seven and a half minute mark. The drumming is colossal, positively megalithic.
At times, shit gets really weird, and no more weird than on the frenzied thrash of ‘Disposable’, where everything jolts and crashes against everything else: the riff is as relentless as it is chaotic, then from amidst the frenetic cacophony, bold brass bursts forth, and fuck me if it doesn’t border on ska-punk, and it would be quite the knees-up were it not for the fact that everything else in this manic maelstrom is gritty metal and heavy as hell. ‘The Psychopomp’ sounds like a stomping keyboard-led synthy glam stomper , and is perhaps the most overtly prog piece on here. Around the mid-point it hits a heavy groove, overlayed with some agitated-sounding but also absolutely epic brass. These guys certainly get thee way of layering: there is simply so much going on across the span of each song, let along the full expanse of Camouflage that it’s difficult to digest.
The delicate woodwind into on ‘Toute Cette Violence Qui Est En Moi’ gradually evolves into some brazenly meandering jazz, with rattling percussion and a sense of space – space to breathe, space in general. Moments later, ‘All These Bells and Whistles Part I’ piledrives in with a frenzy of horns and percussion and off-the scale discord and crazed incongruity – not to mention thunderous end-of-days power chords which slug their way, low slow, and heavy, to the end. It’s a long four and a half minutes, a crawling trudging grind worthy of early Swans, with the addition of dingy, devastating vocals.
The two-part ‘All These Bells and Whistles’, with a combined running time of almost twelve minutes is truly a monster, and this is a fair description of this genre-smashing effort. I expected to have some pithy summary, but my brain is fried. It’s dark, it’s gnarly, it’s jazzy, it’s heavy… it’s everything all at once.
AA
Aural Aggravation 