Attika

No new bodies are found when it’s said talent isn’t a measuring stick for greatness or success. Your band can consist of some stylishly-learned musicians, maybe even some of the best if you’re really lucky, but there’s no guarantee the lot of ya can arrange something compelling enough to throw someone’s fist in the air. Let’s hear some applause for the clattering demise of most ‘supergroups’ that rise up every so often. On the other foot, we should really put our hands together for the technically inferior band that can write at least semi-absorbing songs you can listen to ‘til your dogs whimper. Most members of Venom and Celtic Frost were ghastly musicians, knew it, and appropriately traveled within their slender sphere of practical knowledge. Yet they managed to succeed with prominence. Acts like Mercyful Fate and Dream Theater were musically their opposite, yet triumphed in their (far) superior musical world…and most of them shared the same fans. In other words, you can have all the chops – Olympic-level fretboardists, angel/devil-touched lungs, beguiling drumwork that can fill canyons – but if it goes nowhere, if it wanders around with little inspiration or rotates with a windmill’s animation, the whole thing can fall into the crowds of the faceless. That’s where Florida’s Attika find a home, a musically alert four-piece bogged down by welterweight imagination.

I wish I could dig up some more charm in this eight-tracker, but I find most of it easy to forget despite its repetitive drive. Man, can they beat some of these rhythms to death. You’d think after hearing the same riff for four+ minutes you’d have to wrench it from your psyche with a crowbar, but these find the off ramp regularly. Take “Blindman’s Run”. The main rhythm never runs out of breath as it jogs down its lonely road, but after almost six minutes you’d like to strangle the air out of it. The thing is you’re liable to forget it exists before you can get your mitts on it, but since it’s not at all lively enough to out-weave or out-smart you it should be an easy catch. And for something loopy, the chorus has this weird, ultra-pronounced bass part that sounds like the studio’s doorbell accidentally got recorded into the mix (I know people say they can never hear bass in recordings, but this is retarded). For “Bad City” we’re treated to a brand new riff that incidentally offers up a change or two, but with the snazziness of a monotone lecturer it quickly ages. “Kings in Hell” isn’t much better. So with the first three tracks you could be embattled with plans to scrap this particular listening experience, and at this point who can blame you? Not I.

But then you’ve got “The Motherlode”, the most intimidating work here, a grumbling sprawler atoning with a weird quick-time doom-step. Does it beat the rhythm’s head in with a ride cymbal? Oh yeah, but by this belabored moment in time you actually kinda grasp that this drone tactic has become the band’s signature whether they planned it or not. Save your sleeping pills, you have this. Now we’re halfway through, half in the ditch, so you may as well spin your wheels trying to get out.

The rest is a little more oily while still running rampant in totally straight n’ safe corridors. Most things on the wild side are elsewhere, out to three drink lunches to punch up other acts’ labors of love. No real nooks and crannies are explored, probably because there really aren’t any. All in all stiff, static, and solitary, light in the creative arteries like Ruffians or a weak-willed Apocrypha, though to be fair some redemption comes with ornaments that’re fairly compelling if not simply catchy, like the streaming chorus of “Glory Bound” or when closer “When Cowards Die”’s phantom Maiden strategy finally laces up a pair of gloves that’re probably the disc’s most dynamic upsurge, and something optimistic can be said about its delicate, heartfelt entrance as well. The solos in “Glory Bound” and “Racing the Dawn” are proficient and befitting without squeezing into fancy pants, and the Latin-tinged, acoustically classy instrumental “Exiled” is a shiner of what Joe Longobardi can do as a guitarist when he’s not grinding the life out of his worst enemy, which I fear is any song’s main rhythm.

Getting back to my original point, musically the band knows what it's doing (though the vocals of Robert Van War waver a little too off-center and unspectacular for me), but you need to rent some hefty equipment to pull anything cranium-expanding from its cactus-dotted land. Power metal? Aside from a few sparse kicks, hardly with this waned reactor.

I’d trudge through their ’91 follow-up but I think what’s already been written there is on the ball.