Still best known for their brilliant Dickhead video of a few years ago, Steak Number Eight seem to suffer for their laudable gift of not fitting in.
Kosmokoma once again showcases a band with a ludicrous amount of ideas and a vast amount of energy with which to implement them. They remain impossible to pin down: the opening Return Of The Kolomon skips from galloping mathcore to dreamy post-rock, and back again, with insouciant cheek and a tangible sense of ‘We’ve only just started!’
What follows is both bewildering and thrilling. Your Soul Deserves To Die Twice is a blur of riffs, skewed psychedelia, forlorn melodies and bursts of feral aggression; Charades is a wayward waltz through screeching highs and sobering lows; It Might Be Lights sounds like Unsane jamming with Swervedriver before disappearing off on a prog-punk tangent.
Maybe it’s their daft name or the curse of making a funny video… either way, Steak Number Eight deserve more attention and Kosmokoma is brilliant enough to make that happen.
