Danava - Unonou (Kemado)
3/5
By: Charlie Potter
When you first put this CD on, within the initial few seconds you think it might be a healthy dose of cool stoner, yet after a short while you realise that it sounds far more like Rick Wakeman than any stoner band. And suddenly it doesn't seem so cool any more.
But personally I was overjoyed with this revelation. I don't really like my rock music cool, I think when you put together rock and cool it's a pretty dangerous mix. Rock is more often about scrunching your face up to a really satisfying riff or a bit of really technical brilliance.
Yeah, that's right, I said technical brilliance. I'm saying it's OK to enjoy something for its technical brilliance. It hurts me deep down to say such a thing as a young teenager one of my best friends was into all his Joe Satriani and Steve Vai and I hated it. I still have never heard anything by Joe Satriani that I thought was not either excessively cringe worthy or totally boring and I still don't think that a band has to have any level of technical skill to be good at all, but my point is that some artists' technical skill can be a path to something really interesting and unusual, such as Dillinger Escape Plan. Then there are bands where the technical skill blinds from the whole point in making music in the first place such as Mr. Satriani, then there are bands that are better off without any technical skill like any early punk band. But of course it's all totally subjective (yadda yadda), as if someone gets enjoyment from music purely through recognising technical skill then let them have it. Everything is OK really, you know how it goes.
This is a band comfortable with a moderate amount of technical skill, but only for the kicks - they're not going to be on the front of Total Guitar every month forever.
So you get the idea. The overall sound is a sort of psychedelic stoner Wakeman voyage. As it chugs along it becomes very apparent that this band are also big fans of Black Sabbath but despite all these comparisons there is a lot of variation - you get wibbly keyboard bits, fun solos, build ups... all the ingredients for a comfortably diverse album that still satisfies a particular mood. Danava manage to achieve that thing that Wakeman does where a verse or bit of singing very much aimed at grabbing your attention will dip away to a weird bit of keyboard wibbling that acts like a sort of intermission. This, amongst other forgotten tricks provides a structurally adventurous yet comfortable listen. Most of the tracks are quite long and have a lot in them but don't drag on, and though you could call them over the top in the respect that they really are playing music, the end result is very considered, neat and not over laboured, just carefully mapped out.
My favourite parts are definitely they proggy keyboard parts, which I get the feeling are a little bit hidden away, somewhat unfairly. They don't really feature properly until the end of the second song, but when they do emerge, they really give the sound so much more depth. I think it's a shame that this style of keyboarding was shunned so harshly with the emergence of punk because there really is so much that can be done with a keyboard player who isn't scared to use his keyboard like a sort of synthetic orchestra.
Unonou is a great little album, but ultimately its main flaw is that they could take it so much further. All out synth epics are exactly what the world is waiting for, what with the master Wakeman long since converted to Christian boringness we need someone to take his place, and this sludgy space rock is the perfect building block to launch synth epic off of, as Danava have shown at various points, particularly the last two tracks. Come on guys, how about two guitars soloing at once?! It'd be great!
So close.
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