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Kekal

8

Written by: PP on 09/06/2011 20:43:28

Kekal are a black metal turned avant-garde metal band from Jakarta, Indonesia. They are sometimes referred to as an extreme progressive metal band, but that's not what makes their eighth record, the suitably titled "8", intriguing. It so happens that prior, during, and after the release of this album, there are no official members in Kekal. All band members left the project in 2009, effectively removing the band from existence in the real world. It turns out, however, that they continue to supply their artistic outputs to the project in, as far as we are aware, complete disconnection from one another, and hence we have a new album to the surprise to the fans and critics of the band.

So how exactly would such an arrangement work? Well, it doesn't. The record literally sounds like cut-and-pasted noise/avant-garde elements thrown together at random. Off tune electronic beats echo around a semi-industrial soundscape with lots of effect-laden distortion, dissonance, and eardrum-shattering distortion. Occasionally some vocals make an appearance in complete disregard of the structure of the songs, which itself is in complete disarray. The elitists and hipsters will undoubtedly call it pushing boundaries and highly experimental to use analog synths, vocoder, and even the vuvuzela in electronic arrangements that have been put together at random, but to this scribe the border between actual music and pure noise has been crossed. That Kekal try to pass this mess of distorted, repulsive non-melodies as a record is nothing short of outrageous, avant-garde or not.

Download: A Linear Passage
For the fans of: Vverevvolf Grehv, nonsensical electronic metal chaos
Listen: Myspace

Release date December 2010
Whirlwind Records