Formula

This was the last mission of James Bond… sorry, Plotkin, as an old lady driver… yeah, secret agents have to think of all absurd disguises in order to avoid their cover being blown. And fair play to that, cause in this way the man, alongside his comrade Alan Dubin, managed to stay afloat all the way to the mid-90’s, to all the KGB thugs’ chagrin.

Said 90’s were a transformational period, and all both old and new practitioners rushed to contribute to the skin-shedding shenanigans, some getting away with it, like Plotkin and Co. with the excellent “Lo Flux Tube”, a visionary futuristic amalgam of industrial, metal, progressive, and avant-garde which still flirted with some of the straight-forward grindcore ferocity of their first instalment in a crooked but utterly listenable manner. This ground-breaking slab was followed by the even weirder electronic/industrial opus “The Musical Dimension of Sleastak” where metal was only slightly hinted at, the guys branching out into the more or less unexpected with thinly veiled audacity.

The formula takes a turn towards something psychedelic and trance-inducing with the album reviewed here, another outlandish offering by the crew who by that time only comprised Plotkin and Dubin. The guys continue with their expansive explorations of the musical universe, heeding very few metal condiments along the way, providing the listener with a hypnotic, psychedelic again, progressive rock/fusion/synth opera which on the 11-min opener “Last Look” is a longing look back at the heritage of early Killing Joke, Chrome and Hawkwind, a soothing, also hypnotic, stroll that tolerates no energizing strokes of any kind, Dubin providing a clean semi-declamatory stoned croon to assist the quietly surreal musical background. His vocal minimalism easily accommodates the synth-pop pretensions (“Break (You)”, “Devolve”) of the album, those still immersed in an unnerving industrial clout, the latter disappearing for the bouncy fusion progressiver “Underglass”, the frolic parade initiated by that cut later followed by another nod at the Killing Joke and Chrome repertoire with the dry sterile “Thug”, the peace instilled on that one broken by a short excerpt from the band’s early grindcore atrocities. “Rid” would be a pleasant surprise, an outtake from the “Lo Flux Tube" sessions, a dynamic industrial jump-around with nice melodic tubes... sorry, tunes flying in the ether to a sizeable hallucinogenic effect, with Dubin inserting a couple of his old harsh sinister semi-whispers. Sounds like a deal all of a sudden, this bizarre odyssey, but “Amoeba” shuts the door to all past reminiscences with a renewed all-instrumental electronic/techno/noise vigour.

Visionary? Not so much anymore, provided that quite a few teams were following the same path of more or less sincere self-discovery, trying various styles as they went, but making sure they very seldom felt nostalgic about their roots. It’s also hard to tell if this album is the most logical sequel to its predecessor. The “… Sleastak” sounded like an accumulation of bizarre vistas, some of those not always related to music; the delivery here is strictly on the listenable side, like Plotkin has decided to swerve into a more commercial direction after the piles of eccentricity he provided earlier, both to keep his band afloat and to give way to other musical predilections of his, ones which metal merits are disputable at best. With this recording the two artists delineated themselves from the metal crowd with a deliberate bang, not exactly merging with the prevalent mid-90’s crowd, but not quite making it to the true pioneer pedestal to where this tube they took in 1991 was carrying them head-over-heels. The formula received no other aberration after that last one… game over.

The guys continued with their mission elsewhere afterwards, one which took a fairly lethargic doom/drone shape with Khanate, a project that was entertained for nearly a decade, with Plotkin trying something stranger and more eclectic with Khlyst, a one-album-wonder (“Chaos Is My Name”, 2006) which firmly stood on the verge of the avant-garde with death, doom, fusion, jazz and industrial mixed together for a confusing incongruent, intentionally ponderous ride… not the formula to be followed if one wants to walk with the finest out there. Cause Plotkin knows how that feels… even when he occasionally had to drive the old ladies to the theatre downtown to experience psychedelic electronic vaudevilles… strictly at their request, mind you.