Hunger of Elements

When I started listening to this second album by Kataxu I thought I was going to like it much more than the debut, because, except for a few similarities, they are very different in many aspects. First of all the aesthetics and the production in general, the leap is very significant, "Roots Thunder" was very raw, poor and lugubrious, while Hunger of Elements is much cleaner, bombastic and colourful. You may like the debut better than this one, but clearly the definitive idea of what Piąty intended Kataxu to sound like is here. And even if he manages to achieve that, his music still doesn't particularly grab my attention.

My main problem with Kataxu's music on this release is that it doesn't seem cohesive at all, it doesn't work together, as if several things are happening at the same time and nothing fits at all. The way the sound is approached reminds me of "Goat Horns" but with everything done in a much worse way even though it came out 8 years later. Well, let's briefly dissect "Goat Horns", an album that is also very keyboard oriented but has room for drums and guitar, the latter is used more as a rhythmic base (as if it were a bass) but they have a crispy and persistent sound.And the drums are used more as an accompaniment to the two keyboards, which are the fundamental pieces of the album, their use is as harmonic as it is atmospheric, playing the two different strokes of the composition simultaneously to create a very marked and differential sound that if or if it manages to be quite rewarding, if we add to this the folk influence that makes the melodies sound quite unique with a happy tone and its raw production but still giving opportunity for all instruments to sound, we end up having one of the best symphonic black metal albums made in the 90s. Well, Kataxu takes this idea and does it all wrong, to begin with the production, which is cleaner, yes, but also more digital and less compact, the guitars are hardly appreciated, they also serve as a rhythmic element but have no punch or sparkle, lost in this extremely digital sound. And the drums are not very noticeable either, when their presence is felt it is only to make pure blast beats, so this ends up developing into an extremely relayed album on the keyboards, and this is where there is another of the big problems.

There are a lot of problems with the keyboards on Hunger of Elements, remember the fact that, according to the album notes, up to three people have been involved in the keyboards on this album, and yet this is barely noticeable on any of the "main" songs, it's quite commendable that 90% of the keyboard lines are bland and linear, without any kind of harmonious plucking that stands out, they sound like they are in the background for something bigger, but there is nothing that sounds louder than the keyboards. This is something I was already complaining about on Roots Thunder, the sound of both albums is predominantly keyboard driven and both albums don't really use that element as their most remarkable part. Piąty seems much more concerned about keeping his compositions in constant movement to give a false sense of epic songwriting that builds up much larger landscapes than he actually does. In the end he tries so hard to be so varied for absolutely no single section of the album to be memorable. I remember perfectly the morning I listened to this album for the first time, suddenly it was over and I was like "I don't remember a single note of what I just listened to" but I thought it was my fault because I had been playing computer games while I was doing that, but then I listened to "Svartalvheim" for the first time while playing and there were numerous times when I had to press pause to listen more closely to different sections in several songs from an album that really did manage to make interesting compositions, literally night and day between these two albums in terms of songwriting and memorability.

On this record Kataxu again puts into practice this concept of organising the songs in a way that makes them feel more fluid, this time alternating between long songs, the ones I previously called main songs, and others of short and instrumental concept, which can practically be called interludes. Well precisely these interludes are the most interesting pieces of the whole album, is when they really give pure space to the keyboards to intercalate compositionally and create interesting spaces with pleasant melodies for the ear, also in these we don't have to hear Piąty's voice, which is incredibly monotonous and without character when in Roots Thunder his diverse characterizations with the voice was the best thing of the album.

In short, Hunger of Elements is another failed piece by the polish project that is unable to fill empty content with anything of substance.