The Stroymachine - Renesonanza
This review was commissioned. However, it bears no weight on the score or decision. All reviews are written from an unbiased standpoint.
I suppose, in the traditional sense, industrial music hasn’t really been industrial music in quite some time. A very DIY approach with bizarre instruments is what started the genre and that art has been kind of lost for quite some time. Not that I’m complaining; I absolutely love what the scene has involved into. But so few bands take the roots into consideration minus a few, the most notable being that of Author & Punisher who engineered his own gigantic machine that he plays his music on. That’s where bands such as The Stroymachine step in; this setup of primarily percussionists uses crafted instruments mostly made from recycled materials. And here’s where I tell you how it all sounds at the end of the day.
The first song on the album is a tribal piece titled ‘Mi$a’ which doesn’t really sound all that DIY; it has a pretty damned good production for a bunch of people using made up instruments without a proper studio. What we get is an eleven-minute tribal ode featuring lots of ambient synths, drum patterns, experimental notes, and a rather grim opening featuring some howling. The song goes through patterns of ritualistic drumming to what simply sounds like a battle cry as horns are blared out, even going so far as to incorporate swing elements. It’s a ride from start to finish, though it does demand some time.
The second song on the album ‘Selachimorphine’ isn’t as impressive as the first. It sounds much more improvised as there’s so many elements on the song that are doing battle with one another. Drums fight with what sounds like a saxophone for domination, but neither one are working together. While I’ve always found improvised segments to be good for gaining a general direction of a song, committing them to a production isn’t always a best-case scenario. The elements on their own sound good enough, but paired together it doesn’t work. This is how I felt for songs such as ‘Overdub’, or the dance rhythm of ‘B-Rave paired with the random horns and offbeat synth notes.
‘K.R.T. Combine’ sounds like its gearing up to be an energetic punk or rock song at first thanks to the immediate bass guitar notes that dominates the song, but it transcends back into the percussive rhythms that The Stroymachine want to be dominant. There’s a bit of room for some scat singing, which in the end just sounds like a little goblin going along with the rhythm to the best of their ability, but it works a bit.
‘Vmesnik’ just isn’t worth the fifty-six seconds it lasts. Feedback with some percussion underneath; it’s not creative or artsy, it’s just stupid.
‘Niedrich’ is probably the most song-type-song that you’ll find on ‘Renesonanza’. A mixture of what’s been presented so far with some punk sensibilities that has a rapid beat that only gets faster and faster as time goes on. It’s actually a fairly creative endeavor, even if a bit repetitious.
‘1KG’ isn’t all that interesting. It sounds like a construction site for the most part, where one of the people working there is on break with a drumset and decided to raise morale by slamming his drumsticks as hard as he can. It’s nothing grand and is a bit minimalist for my tastes. Echoing what STOMP does without the energy of STOMP. The final song on the album is an amalgamation of everything that you’ve heard thus far, except with a really shitty ambient ending that sounds like every other ambient ending with….Birds chirping. And water pouring. Standard stuff that lasts for about three and a half minutes.
So, at the end of the day, after listening to this album a couple of times, I ask myself the question: Would I recommend this album? Overall, the answer is no. It’s a very messy album that has decent ideas in place, but to many of those ideas fall to the wayside to keep the album sounding improvised. And most times, in music, improvisation means messy. If there was any one song I would recommend, it would probably be the opening track ‘Mi$a’ as that one is quite nice and ramps me up. The rest, though, is either plain bad or polarizing for one reason or another. Simply put, this is not an album I’ll be coming back to any point soon.
Jan 21 2024
Steven Gullotta
info@brutalresonance.comI've been writing for Brutal Resonance since November of 2012 and now serve as the editor-in-chief. I love the dark electronic underground and usually have too much to listen to at once but I love it. I am also an editor at Aggressive Deprivation, a digital/physical magazine since March of 2016. I support the scene as much as I can from my humble laptop.
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