OR`Zine №27-2024
This intercity project is an old friend of our publication, so we can’t write a bad review. No, we can, of course, but then it will be biased, since the guys have been producing excellent material for several years now! And this 10-track LP is no exception: “Dark Desires” by Druknroll still holds the brand of adequate, sometimes ragged and psychedelic, but no less listenable Progressive Metal, well, or a direction derived from it. You can’t really dance to the songs that fill this record, and although there are quite fast compositions, in general the tempo here jumps like crazy, maybe that’s why DRUKNROLL prefer to sit in the studios, and not chop “metal” on stage – people having fun in the hall in a dissonant fit, can very well break their heads, and this is an article! In one interview, Druknroll once said that DRUKNROLL has a tradition of releasing one full-length album every two years, one has already passed, which means at the end of this year, 2024, it may be possible to get our hands on another creation of these neurotics with bipolar. Let’s wait!
Yuri Khmelev
HEADBANGER
The Saratov metal project Druknroll has long demonstrated an enviable stability even for its city – an album every two years. After all, the musicians do not give concerts, so exclusively studio work is convenient and suits everyone. “My Dark Desires” became the seventh full-length album in the discography of the project, and what can you come to after so many years? Personally, I like the first albums more, they somehow have more interesting ideas than the last ones, which went into brutality, but this is only a matter of taste. “My Dark Desires” sounds habitually cheerful, malicious and aggressive, sometimes even too much, but who can be surprised by this today? The project has its own creative style and recognition, which runs through all the material, starting with the first single “Metal Night” – these are the ubiquitous keyboards, and orchestral elements, and flirting with progressive music. The evolution of creativity is, of course, noticeable, but not so striking, because Druknroll’s music has always been complicated. It doesn’t quite fit the term “experimental” so beloved by all sorts of other bands, it’s just that there’s a lot of different stuff crammed in here, and it’s always been that way. I’ve always considered Druknroll’s music to be a kind of patchwork quilt of metal for its excessive eclecticism, it’s cool in its own way, it has its own gimmick. And the project has always had some kind of consistency in its creativity, despite the frequent crazy (in a good way) arrangements. The subject matter contains references to various fashionable and relevant metal bands of their time, for example, Mnemic and Strapping Young Lad, but otherwise it’s still Druknroll, a band that is surprisingly difficult to confuse with anything else. And despite their stable productivity, the musicians are still capable of producing powerful and effective songs, full of thunderous aggression and toxic madness. Nothing unusual in our time, but not so trivial that it would be completely uninteresting to listen to. Specific, but consistently specific, and if you like this, I am sure the group will be able to please you for a long time.
7/10
Petr Fateev
https://headbanger.ru/reviews/album-5767
ONMUSICSTAGE
DRUKNROLL know how to surprise with each album – despite the enviable speed of new releases, each of them is not a copy of previous works in terms of sound. What is invariably present in all albums is the signature aggressive sound and melodic arrangements. The material of the newly released ‘My Dark Desires’ is unrealistically rich in emotions this time. They did not just merge all the sadness, negative energy, aggression and sorrow in the songs, but were able to make it all easy to listen to, despite the heaviness of the music, and not oppressively, which is why the entire full-length album can really be listened to in one sitting. Right from the first track “Apparent Lies”, the atmosphere is mind-blowing, annoying in the intro and infernal in the choruses. The bass part actively stands out, a smooth transition from hard-fierce to less heavy metal is practiced. The complexity of DRUKNROLL is not so much in the virtuoso guitar parts (this is no longer disputed), but in the non-standard time signatures, allowing them to quite accurately embody the corresponding emotions in the songs “Hate”, “My Black Envy” and “Sorrow”, showing them almost as the most terrible mortal sins. The “medical” part of the album leads into confusion, expressed in complex drum parts, rather difficult to perform vocals, and most importantly – in a simply virtuoso melodic and at the same time disharmonious melodic line. An interesting experiment is “Welcome to Mars”, where in the interlude the vocals sound machine-alien, as if the text was composed by a computer using incorrect mathematical formulas. Against this background, even the subsequent “Disharmony”, despite the name, sounds unexpectedly harmonious for this album!
Towards the end of the album, in “My Dark Desires” and “Unnecessary Time”, the sound becomes metallic again, ragged and broken, the rhythm sections are again filled with incoherent rhythms, and the vocals are emotional and contrasting. There is pure singing that evokes sadness, and crazy frantic screams that make you want to destroy everything around you. And sometimes there are painful hysterical screams that convey every drop of pain from the performer to the listener. In general, it is worth reading the lyrics of all the songs separately – they are unexpectedly easy to understand for non-native speakers, and at the same time – very emotional. And it is pleasant to listen to, and they are not perceived as just a sound curtain of DRUKNROLL – you will involuntarily listen and be imbued!
Evgeniya Lichman
http://onmusicstage.com/view/8677
ROCKCOR № 1-2023
It’s amazing how accurately the Saratov experimentalists from Druknroll chose the title for their newest album! Why exactly? Because for ten years now they’ve been doing nothing but singing about dark desires and mental paradoxes, and now they’ve quietly approached the very peak of all these trends. “My Dark Desires” for Druknroll is like a black album for Metallica – the most stylish, simple, verified and well-coordinated, not yet having lost all of its most successful and spectacular features – and, by the way, in “Welcome To Mars” and “Disharmony” the current Druknroll really seem to have something from the style of Hetfield and Hammett. There are as many as ten tracks on “My Dark Desires”, and with the incredible love of this group for rapid-fire EPs, which almost everyone already knows about, this is another achievement of their newest release. Drukanrolls gathered their thoughts, concentrated properly, and eventually produced a real full-length album with the same real and full-length quintessence of their plans, ideas and fantasies. More and more chamber fragments, playing on contrasts, unexpected inserts, experiments with vocals (in the same “Welcome To Mars” we hear some crazy recitative) and here is the result – before us is a real psycho-circus in thrash. Well, to be a little more precise, in terms of music we have progressive groove metal with broken structures and unpredictable transitions. Already in the album opener “Apparent Lies” Druknroll slightly resemble a crazy music box from the video of Cradle Of Filth “No Time To Cry”, and further on in the course of the development of the disc the box really goes all out, increasingly turning to symphonisms and melodies, as if they came into the light from the inflamed subcortex of the inhabitants of mental hospitals. Here and megalomania (“Disharmony”), and mania of persecution (“Unnecessary Time”), and a whole herbarium of various phobias and deviations. The guys are getting closer to the classic Coroner and further from the templates and beaten paths of traditional metal. They are fast, brutal and heavy, but even more bold and experimental, which will certainly appeal to those who once tasted Mekong Delta, Voivod, Sacrosanct and Pantera. Their solos are becoming more technical and fast-paced, and sometimes they break away from each other with some kind of obsession, as happens, for example, in “Brain Experiment”, and in “I’m a Tranquilizer Man” the listener is greeted by computer voices of madness, and this is really the culmination of the audio madness happening on the album.
There were also video illustrations on the topic, and this time the musicians chose the track “My Black Envy” as the victim for creating the video. The September vigils in Oleg Kireichuk’s livelinesstudio were clearly rich and intense, and the video sparkles with genuine enthusiasm of real maniacs of their craft, mixed with guitar surgery, an armor-piercing rhythm section and painful images of those who have lost touch with reality and sanity. In fact, in this video, the members of Druknroll in full force try on the guise of those who have irrevocably gone mad, and at the same time mercilessly torture some plush monster. Druknroll are a little different every time, and their newest album is no exception. And every time in my review I compare them with new bands, drawing new parallels in connection with their constantly changing progressive metal whistle-blowing, and today’s disc evoked in me an entirely unprecedented association – a mixture of Korrozia Metalla from the times of “1966”, Coroner and Pantera. Rough, dark, inadequate and incredibly inventive – all together this is called “evil genius”, and, perhaps, this is the most accurate definition that can be addressed to “My Dark Desire” now. Like “Diary Of A Madman”, but in the style of a painful thrash metal groove passed through a meat grinder. Alexey “Astarte Eel” Irineev
https://astartaview.ru/reczenziya-na-albom-gruppy-druknroll-my-dark-desires/
Moscow Meltdown (Rock & Metal)
Do you know what the most important thing for me personally in books is? – the psychological maturation of the main character, which occurs as the plot develops. The character experiences blows of fate, the vicissitudes of life, the insidious plans of enemies and unforeseen circumstances, but does not give up, but grows, matures and gains experience. If at the very beginning of the novel the main character may well give the impression of an infantile and inexperienced person, then by the end of the book he becomes wiser, smarter and simply… different. He has mental and physical scars on his body and it may well be that his life will never be the same again, but he understands that everything he experienced filled his existence with meaning and significance. It’s a paradox, but I see roughly the same thing in the creative path of the Druknroll group, which at the dawn of its career recorded high-quality, but naive and sometimes even infantile music. Today, having gone through a long and thorny path of formation, Druknroll can be safely called one of the most original and intriguing bands of the Russian extreme scene. And the recently released longplay “My Dark Desires” proves this in the best possible way. However, the paradox is that if you compare “My Dark Desires” with the previous two releases of Druknroll, “Unbalanced” and “Freakingface”, it seems to be a much more straightforward and accessible work. This in no way means that the group has gone pop or chosen a commercial path of development – it rather means that local melodies and compositional solutions come from pure and unclouded emotions, are a product of creative charge. When this or that creator creates music under the influence of such passionate inspiration, he rarely thinks about how to make his songs more complex or confusing – he just creates. However, there are also plenty of original features on “My Dark Desires”: unusual time signatures are present on almost half of the songs on the album, and “Hate” and “My Black Envy” are especially pleasing in this regard, and the broken sound that impressed me so much on previous Druknroll longplays has not disappeared and is noticeable both on the opening “Apparent Lies” and on later action-packed songs such as “Unnecessary Time”. I also cannot help but note “Welcome to Mars”, where the influence of modern progressive metal is clearly noticeable, and some guitar progressions reminded me very much of such an innovative band as Haken. At the same time, “My Dark Desires” has enough more straightforward songs, which include “Sorrow” and “Disharmony”. They one hundred percent demonstrate the main elements of the Druknroll sound, which have remained unchanged since the very genesis of the band, when it was still a solo project of Druknroll himself. Most of all, “My Dark Desires” pleased me personally with its lyrics. Uninformed listeners often ask me why metalheads love the aggressive and angry sound of such genres as Death and Black Metal – they say that they carry negative and even destructive emotions and do not instill in a person either optimism or joy. In response, I just shrug my shoulders and say that such music reconciles a person with his inner evil – and let’s be honest, it is in each of us. Each inhabitant of planet Earth can prove to everyone around him as much as he wants that he is a kind and creative person, but do not be mistaken – there is a beast living inside him. The dark side, the embodiment of evil, the animal nature – as you like (as they say, from the change of the terms …). And a person can pretend to be a happy and joyful creature who does only good – sooner or later the dark side of his personality will show itself. Extreme metal allows a person not to hide and ignore their dark side, but to live in harmony with it – to recognize and use it for their own purposes. “My Dark Desires”, as it seemed to me, tells the listener exactly about THIS – about the dark desires of our evil dimension of the soul. Indeed, Druknroll have grown not only in terms of music, but also in terms of lyrics.
“My Dark Desires” is an interesting album, no matter how you look at it. It is aggressive, brutal and twisted, but at the same time melodic, thoughtful and accessible longplay, which will please not only fans of the band, but also new listeners. And what’s most interesting … in their official public in VK, the musicians say that they are ALREADY working on a new album. Phew, these guys are unstoppable!
Nikolay Chuvikov
DARKCITY №128-2023
Saratov’s Druknroll tirelessly master the field of progressive thrash, saturating it with elements of melodic death, groove and hardcore. The current album became the seventh in their discography and the second on a domestic label (the musicians collaborated with the Metal Scrap Records label for a long time). The difficult situation in the world may have influenced the overall sound of My Dark Desires, since it is difficult to imagine more evil and furious music from the Volga metalheads. At the same time, the brutal canvas, no-no, and pierce dagger blows of synthesizers and break through melodic guitar passages. Almost hardcore speed often gives way to almost enveloping, gloomy melodic death, on which thrash with a good note of groove is strung. If we touch on the lyrical component, the issues of the confrontation between man and society are raised again, but this time in a purely personal, mental sense. The one who peers into the abyss should remember that the abyss is also peering into him (c), each of us has a “swarm of mad demons” swirling inside us and dark desires can lead us beyond the line that everyone will determine for themselves. In a word, Druknroll have almost overcome another bar and now it is very important to consolidate their success.
Mensehenmaterial
Портал СУБКУЛЬТУРА
INTERESTING PSYCHIATRY FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF TECHNO THRASH METAL WORKERS
The Saratov obscurantists from “Druknroll” have always shown interest in psychiatric topics, and now they have advanced on their path of psychoperversions to the very last limit. Their broken expressionism of progressive, thrash, death and God knows what else already sounds strange and threatening in itself, and when psychic demonism in the lyrics is mixed in, everything becomes even more dashing, as it turned out, in general, on their latest full-length album My Dark Desires.
My dark desires…. If such a topic is declared, then you can’t shoot back with EPs and singles – a full-length album is really needed, a very broad field for conversation is flaring up. What desires could a depressed regular at a shrink’s office have and what could an aesthete-psychopath want? Of course, to infect as many people around him as possible with his dark aesthetics! The stern men from “Druknroll” are raging like crazy and wielding their guitars and drumsticks at the ready. You turn on their record – and it’s like you’re falling with all your might onto a picket fence of broken firewood and logs that fell out of your own eyes. It’s scary, uncomfortable, loud, it’s as if someone poured needles into your pants, and if you turn on the video shot on My Black Envy, then as a bonus, plush black devilry from it will jump and flicker before your eyes… This is what “Druknroll” were able to bring to the classics of techno-trash and themselves – now they are not only scary and nightmarish, but also ironic. And irony, as we know, is a constant feature of all true madmen, geniuses and creatures of mental darkness, and the performers of progressive thrash-n-death are no exception.
The harsh, unpredictable and dangerous rumble that Druknroll spews out of themselves invigorates like watching a good thriller on a summer midnight, and the video version of My Black Envy helps to penetrate the atmosphere of maddening fun and amusing madness even more. Perhaps this is how music for real men should sound – heavy, smart, burning with the spirit of adventurism and ready at any moment to demonstrate its secret demon, which lurks somewhere in the hypochondrium and strives to stir up some kind of mischief in the most inappropriate situation for it.
I think that most listeners have already gradually gotten used to their ponderous reflection in the style of a waltz of crazy reinforced concrete piles, but the current longplay still showed everything from a slightly different angle. There are no excessive instrumental complications, nothing too avant-garde or provocative, everything is quite relaxed and “on the go” (yeah, quite in the style of the video sequence of the mentioned clip), but at the same time it is still avant-garde, and provocative, and very cool from the point of view of technical perfection. My Dark Desires is a classic “Druknroll”, and this time they are closer to perfection than ever, having worked out a certain mastery in songwriting and production over the years of desperate attempts to become better. And in terms of sound, it is like chaos, unleashed and the Cerberuses of evil on a walk. Remember the introduction of the Jujasprist track Dead Meat, when the dogs greedily, noisily and with great fury tear something to pieces? Now “Druknroll” is cutting something similar, only it doesn’t last a few seconds, but a full-length longplay with ten tracks in the clip. And some of the seasoned music lovers will say, “Only ten? Just a standard full-length longplay, nothing unusual!” But no, in “Druknroll” this magic number is adequate in its weight to ten huge weights of a muscle-covered weightlifter, and if this set is to be characterized somehow, the best expression would be “it won’t seem like a little.”The opening of the psycho-neurological dispensary named “Druknroll” was a success, the musicians themselves visited their own hospital as patients while they were working on the album, and it seems that in the end they were quite pleased with the result that was brought to light. This release is their claim to maturity and adulthood, and, of course, there will be no cheap shock value, but only adult, respectable, but nonetheless no less reckless liberties, crawled out of the meat grinder of the ageless male craving for hooliganism, which turned out to be elegantly dissected and taken apart piece by piece, by someone guided by a young psychiatrist’s handbook as interpreted by a young mechanic. And how cool that our venerable label Dark East Productions, which at one time released a whole bunch of cool releases in collaboration with Nihil Art Music and their sublabel Deleting Soul, took on the release and distribution of this dark charm. The musical product, of course, is very much an acquired taste, but if you are not afraid of powerful, painful and complex music, and the hash of “Motorhead”, “Coroner”, “Pantera”, “Metallica”, Schnittke and “Soilwork” does not seem tasteless to you by definition, you can definitely try it. Although in general, such things are not tried, but purposefully and consciously studied, and everyone who tried My Dark Desires at least once, tries them now. (in a mental hospital, heh – a joke) In my opinion, the topic is far from exhausted, and we should wait for a full-length sequel, and let there be more about perverted libido, nightmares from the working annals of sexologists, and stories of sexual deviations will not be ignored either.
5/5
Diana “Isis Bite” Tepes