You can’t knock ’em for lack of product. Hot on the spurs of sixth album Truth Button, issued at the turn of the year, KingBathmat are back already with Overcoming The Monster. According to the press blurb, this one attempts to shake off the ‘clandestine forms of control’ that shackle our daily lives.
The theme finds echoes in the lyrics of songs like Sentinel and Reality Mining, though it’s the unfettered approach to the music that’s most persuasive. If it’s handy reference points you’re after, forget it. Suffice to say that it’s easier to say where this record doesn’t go.
The monolithic riff that kicks off Superfluous suggests we might be in for some Sabbath-fired metal splurge. But it soon gets altogether deeper and more psychedelic, before puttering to a close with a lovely piano refrain and the sound of a stylus shooshing across vinyl. They can certainly get very wiggy with a keyboard.
Parasomnia bucks and bends through a gallery of prog reference points (early Genesis and Yes) before locking into a great set-to between the distorted guitar lines of John Bassett and synth player David Georgiou.
Wild, woolly and utterly engrossing, this is dizzying stuff.
