DARKSIDE
Saratov progressive terrorists have always been a scary and incomprehensible beast, their ideas were strange, their releases never had any obvious hit-making potential, and the tracks they chopped up were cunning, technical and aggressive. They haven’t changed themselves today. The band’s newest EP “Ubity Telefon” (have you also remembered your first Nokia or Siemens, which served you faithfully and would have served you for another three hundred years, if one day you hadn’t bought yourself a smartphone or just a slightly more stubborn and cool push-button model?) is a typical Mr. Druknroll smorgasbord of trash, death and prog, which, if you devote too much time or attention to, can easily break your brain and become disappointed in everything and everyone.
Fifteen minutes of three tracks from “Dead Phone” will remind those who have forgotten about Fermat’s theorem and how to be forever young, and the title track will tell about how our phones monitor us and enslave our desires, will and basic instincts. The references indicated in the press release of the band do not at all reveal the specifics of Druknroll’s own work, and it is chaotic, schizophrenic and even psychedelic. The beeps of push-button phones in “Dead Phone” and other electronic effects in the other tracks create an atmosphere of general hysteria, psychosis and oppressive darkness, which was typical for Voivod in the late 90s or for Waltari, but hardly has anything to do with Dark Tranquillity, Soilwork or especially Children Of Bodom. Their new cacophony is again released by the Ukrainians from Metal Scrap, and this musical imbalance is again complemented by an interesting video clip. To paraphrase a classic Soviet film, one can say that if a person is a maniac, then it is for a long time, and the video “Dead Phone” proves it. The vocalist Uzhas, who is in the foreground in the video, with his colorful biker appearance and not weak dimensions, could win the competition of brutal doubles of Pukhlyash from Little Big, and in charisma he is not inferior not only to Pukhlyash, but also to the frontman of Crematory Felix.
Maniacs are different and their manias and perverted fantasies are also different, so Druknroll, after the pseudo-love story of the previous video, decided to go to the next level and show that not only people or gadgets can be manic, but reality itself is manic (yeah, there is so much incomprehensible and strange in the world, and then there is this multiplication table… And Fermat’s theorem is generally a clinic and a mental train off the rails).
“Dead Phone” is manic, and this is the most precise and definite thing that can be said about this release. Only a complete pervert and psychopath or a genius in his head Schnittke-Prokofiev can torment musical instruments with such passion and animal fury, forcing them to “give birth” to a new universal formula of existence. I will not undertake to claim that Mr. Druknroll is directly related to any of them, but he would obviously like it very much, and he spares no effort to convince everyone that this is not just his fantasies and inflamed ego, but a hard and undeniable reinforced concrete tooth of reality.
If you’ve become too quiet and calm in self-isolation, it’s time to give your ears to be eaten by the “Dead Phone”, which has come to life and is now heading towards you to turn your life into an endless, soul-tearing and mind-tearing noise with a mass of musical “Easter eggs”, harmonic inconsistencies and mathematical paradoxes. Recommending this to typical thrashers in shorts and baseball caps means condemning them to the torment of stylistic dissonances and insoluble dilemmas, recommending Druknroll to fans of melodic death is tantamount to giving a schoolchild a subscription to the “Bulletin of Philosophy” or the “Glavbukh” magazine, but if the ideas and searches of Devin Townsend or Meshuggah are close to you, then you should try licking this battery too. And yes, it seems that my phone is also watching me and is plotting something evil! They are among us, Druknroll is right!
10/10
Aleksei Rokk
https://darkside.ru/album/47611/
ROCKCOR #5/2020
The Saratov progressive experimentalists continue to prepare the world, and at the same time their listeners, for their next full-length album and for this purpose they present the second EP in anticipation of the upcoming longplay. Three tracks, a new official video, an interesting idea and a “speaking” name of the release are intended to intrigue, awaken consciousness and provoke curiosity, well, and then – a matter of technique. “Dead Phone” is something from the category of horrors, and not the healthiest horrors, I must say. It is no coincidence that the vocalist of the group hides under the pseudonym Horror. Having added to their characteristic polyphonic and sometimes even orchestral arrangements the characteristic beeping of old push-button telephones, DRUKNROLL have now become even more ominous and gloomy. Their technogenic modern metal experiments seem to have reached a parity that satisfies everyone, and now progressive ideas and the desire to create an absolute hit coexist in the band’s music without causing harm or damage to each other. All the specific ingredients that DRUKNROLL have always been famous for are present on “Dead Phone” in full, but the concentration of progressiveness and deliberate schizophrenia are now reduced to the most latent and outwardly bozovidny form, due to which your mental immunity is unlikely to have time to suspect something is wrong and even more so to sound the alarm, you will most likely wake up when it is too late to do anything. The musicians have managed to make the devilish heavy prog almost as accessible and listenable as the melodeath fantasies of Children Of Bodom and Soilwork, but this is a deceptive simplicity, and behind it are avant-garde thrash cascades and a sea of raging dissonances. What to do if your phone starts tracking you, and you can’t cope with the thoughts that this will not end well? Just throw it away, buy a “Dead Phone” CD, get out your dusty stereo system and enjoy high-quality sound and high-quality music! And no pranoia. It’s simple.
4/5
Alexey “Astarte Eel” Irineev (Rockcor #5-2020)
БУНКЕР
Why not dilute the furious metal with sounds from old mobile phones and drawn-out beeps unsuccessfully calling out to the subscriber? Probably, these were the thoughts that were spinning in the heads of the musicians from Druknroll when they were working on the single ‘Dead Phone’.
A win-win solution – to add world-famous phone jingles to your track – was relevant back in the 2000s, when every second person had “Pain And Prodigy – Shut Your Mouth Remixxx.wav” as their ringtone. The latest interpretation of this story is no less interesting than the “classic” ringtones – and even more: it evokes a pleasant nostalgic feeling for those times when you could hear the loud sound of pressing buttons live, play your phone like the coolest synthesizer in the world, or even sketch out a simple melody in the built-in midi editor.
The “non-phone” part of the composition is close to Metallica, if they had gathered relatively recently: the riffs are tougher, the vocals are more aggressive, the melody is more pronounced – in a word, the group is trying to take a place on the same stage with famous metal bands, without overshadowing them with their unusualness, but at the same time having their own “tricks” like an acoustic introduction, a sharp exit of fierce drums, logical pauses where required, and a broken structure of the composition and virtuoso guitar solos.
Watching Druknroll is as interesting as listening to them: the video for this song will not leave indifferent any “old-timer” who remembers the feeling of pressing the hard buttons of old mobile phones and once sincerely admired technical progress, not even suspecting how rapidly the world of gadgets will develop, turning phones from a means of communication with loved ones into a terrible analogue of the all-seeing “Big Brother”.
In a word, socially acute. Bright, cool and very topical.
10/10
Anastasia Gaivoronskaya 01.06.2020 Newsmaker