Zaporozhian Mockery

I'll fully admit I only checked Novgorod out because of the name. I've been a massive fan of Russian history ever since I took a USSR history class in university. More recently I've been reading about the broader history of Russia and I have to say it's absolutely fascinating. The region has proved to be such a fulcrum between east and west and was the last holdout in modern times as the age of the empire declined. Anyway, Novgorod was a city of central importance in the days of Kievan Rus and makes for an excellent band name. So how does Novgorod the band live up to it's name? It really, really doesn't. Hell, this isn't even really an album as it is a dude jamming riff ideas on garage band and throwing in some rudimentary drum program.

Zaporozhian Mockery sounds like someone who stumbled upon a passable metal guitar tone in GarageBand (which is harder than you'd think) pressed play for 35 minutes and fucked around with riff ideas and then went back and added leads, bass and really lame drum programming. The Metal Archives lists Novgorod's genre as black metal but that's not really accurate. To be fair, I'm not sure what I'd correct it to. There's certainly elements of black metal, but it's really just a mixed bag of uninspired metal riffs. You've got some thrashier stuff, some doomier fare, some more traditional metal riffs but what a lot of this sounds like is someone who wants to make prog metal but doesn't really know how. There doesn't seem to be any flow or thought to songwriting with the riff progressions. They just haphazardly tumble out one after another.

Besides the riffs there is one thing and one thing alone that makes Zaporozhian Mockery even vaguely listenable. The dude is not amazing and he's not original, but he is a legitimately decent lead guitar player. He tends to go for more melodic traditional metal stuff. It's not great, but it's leaps and bounds above everything else and it's the only reason I was able to make it through the full album. As for the rest, the bass does its job. There's this one section where he tries a wank part, but for the most part it does its job in the background of propping up the guitar reasonably well. The drum machine certainly could sound worse, but it comes across as so fake and sterile. To make matters worse, the bass drum is aggressively clicky.

If you haven't caught on, Novgorod is an instrumental band. The music certainly doesn't justify being purely instrumental, but I also highly doubt vocals could save this. I really don't know how he could look at what he had and think it was ready to be released to the world. The leads are cool at times, but everything else is so aggressively boring that it's just damage control at that point. Zaporozhian Mockery is ultimately inconsequential, but goddamn if this isn't a waste of an excellent band name.