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I Klatus > Targeted > Reviews > gasmask_colostomy
I Klatus - Targeted

Klatus who? - 53%

gasmask_colostomy, June 11th, 2022

Chris Wozniak from Lair Of The Minotaur and Serpent Crown plays drums in this three-piece Chicago act, so I anticipated some sort of quality control and connected thinking when listening to I Klatus, but quite frankly this is some weird shit and I’m not sure I like it. Primarily, Targeted works like an experimental sludge album, with the emphasis on experimental. A ton of strange things are packed into a 28 minute full-length, which is just half the runtime of the preceding Nagual Sun from 5 years earlier, with a few tracks having little in common with metal. You’ve been warned.

‘Solstice of Wind’, as the opener, should perhaps be some indication of the album’s trajectory. It’s not, because it possesses a dusty trip-hop atmosphere that gets whispers, vaguely Middle Eastern female wails, and several different washes of melody and guitar over the top, whereas ‘Shitback and Halfway Damned’ does sludge/stoner riffing more or less to my understanding. Very gruff vocals on this cut probably belong to Tom Denney, yet it breaks down from a relatively fast rumble into spooky violin effects that then coalesce with the returning heavy guitars for an effect somewhat like folk/doom mavens Völur, which is not a name I expected to be writing in this review. The back half of the song could mostly have fitted on an older Crowbar album, so picture me scratching my head as all this unfolds.

Fortunately, I’ve now pretty much explained the main stylistic elements on Targeted, though you shouldn’t rule out the fact that ‘Opium Cyborg’ features a guest playing “gongs and robots”. The remainder of the 5 songs fall more or less into one category out of sludge with odd melodic sensibilities or electronica with everything a bit off-kilter, sometimes combining both, as when the title track dips into each for a time and even spends its last couple of minutes touching blastbeats on one side and psychedelic guitar jamming on the other. As you may have gathered, I remain in a permanent state of bewilderment during much of the listen, while I don’t remember that much afterwards except maybe the slinky synth melody kicking off ‘Dance with the Skulls in the Church’. If I Klatus were hoping to make very off the wall music, they have succeeded; however, they might have lost a listener in the process.