Nitkowski – Chauffeurs (Function)
3/5
By: Chalky
Chauffeurs is a challenging listen; I’m not going to pretend otherwise. If you like listening to songs with clear melodies and some sort of easy going flow then I’d suggest you hurry on by, pop the Fleet Foxes album on and forget a band called Nitkowski ever existed.
Still here? OK, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. UK based Nitkowski’s debut album is essentially dark math rock or even math core if you like, characterised by their ground out, angular melodies, dissonant chords and terrifically complex rhythmic structures. It’s pretty experimental stuff and has been designed to be a difficult pill to swallow.
Drums and guitars take centre stage, leaving the vocals in a position equivalent to trying to understand someone yelling at you on a platform edge while a train travels past at speed, a sort of booming, confused, barely audible bombardment. This arrangement gives Chauffeurs an almost instrumental feel despite there being only three truly instrumental songs: ‘Mutha Terracist’, dark scary movie music with drums that sound like loud claps of thunder; ‘Scrubbers’, a personal favourite where the drums start out sounding like fast ticking clocks and evolve into a ceremonial tribal drumming ritual; and ‘Get A Job’, a very quiet piece with barely audible, dark, organ chords accompanied by random sound effects. Excellent production enables Nitkowski to create atmospheres that feel alive; the drums on ‘Scrubbers’ in particular are dark and spine chilling.
Even after a few listens, someone unaccustomed to the genre could be forgiven for thinking a lot of the tracks sound very alike. ‘The Taste And Stink of Old Coins’, ‘Gukurahundi’, ‘The Beveridge Report’ and ‘Alabaster Drive’ all have the irregular stopping and starting, discordant guitar chords and jarring tempo changes, but as the saying goes, the devil is in the detail and it was only after a good few sessions with this CD did I begin to appreciate the highly complex guitar rhythm workout that is happening in this sort of math rock gym (for the record, this gym has black painted walls and no windows).
One track that stands out in particular, not only in length at 6 minutes and 5 seconds, but also in epic momentum changes is ‘Rev Kid Perv Rap’. Like the most gruelling rollercoaster ride, there are almighty build ups, scary slopes and the occasional relatively calm moment, the guitars and drums working in a more coordinated style supporting each other’s rhythms. Before you can change your pants, you’re thrown back into brutal sounding, manic, incessant drumming and heavy all out rock guitar chugging.
As with any album, the cover art can serve as a window onto the music and in this case I’d say the band has assigned it just about right. Drawn by Eppie Short, a roughly sketched pencilled drawing of two men dragging a naked human form across the floor by two strings (hair?) attached to its head seems an apt reflection of the complex dark world of music contained within, largely experimental and strangely atmospheric.
Artists in this article: Nitkowski
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