You like strange music, right? Of course you do, you’re looking at a website about punk music. Well, if you want something purely baffling to listen to, then go no further. Raketkanon’s first album, unsurprisingly called RKTKN#1 was a lovely (or not, actually) blast of music which sounded like someone smashing a Tomahawk record on their face repeatedly while jumping up and down on a drum kit, and apparently when it came to writing album two they gathered round and said: “Right, same again?”
This weird blend of math rock, hardcore, sludge, and all kinds of other weird and wonderful influences can be pretty difficult to listen to. It’s probably good that it’s only eight tracks long, or most listeners would find themselves going utterly insane by the end.
It is pretty bloody brilliant though. Tracks like ‘Florent’ and ‘Suzanne’ sound like someone losing their mind set to music, with huge riffs that drive the bonkers vocals even further into your brain. It doesn’t help that all kinds of technical wizardry has been added to the vocals in a lot of places, turning something that was simply a bit strange, into one of the weirdest things you are going to hear this year.
With ‘Mathilde’ as well, Raketkanon prove they can not only do smashing things up very loudly, but they can also slow it down and make a sludgier, more sinister track to boot. When it does eventually break down into the more rock side of their personality, it doesn’t feel like Raketkanon did that simply because they wanted to make the song go loud, more just because that feels like the absolute natural next step for that song.
Although technically it is a pretty simple album, RKTKN#2 is actually a piece of musical genius. It isn’t often that something this purely interesting comes around. Admittedly it is easily fathomable that there are going to be a decent chunk of people who simply don’t ‘get’ this music at all, but those who like this, are going to absolutely adore every second of it.
ANDY LEDDINGTON