Hey Colossus - Cuckoo Live Life Like Cuckoo (Album Review)
Friday, 05 April 2013
Written by Ben Bland
London based octet (yes, octet, because eight-piece bands are the new power trios) Hey Colossus have been around for over a decade now, yet they still remain firmly shackled to the underground from whence they came. Then again, something would surely be amiss with the mainstream if the rampant prog stoner noise sludge concoction that defines ‘Cuckoo Live Life like Cuckoo’ was anything other than an underground concern. This is the sort of record that would elicit little more from most people than a bemused scratch of the head.
Opener ‘Hot Grave’ makes for something of a case in point, managing to be groovy, heavy, relatively accessible and utterly mental all at the same time. It’s a bit like plunging the entire contents of your fridge into a blender and ending up with something not only edible but highly delicious. Whether such a result causes you to faint with shock or dive in headfirst is up to you. Head scratchers should be warned, however, that things only get weirder from this point on.
‘How to Tell Time with Jesus’ acts as the centrepiece of the album, by virtue of its demanding bizarreness if not its mammoth length, and proceeds to make my previous food blender analogy seem like a rather naïve way of portraying the character of Hey Colossus. Post-rock dynamics interact with vintage tones of krautrock and psychedelia whilst all the while being viciously mauled by avant-garde noisegasms and even mathy guitar figures. The track acts as a seriously strange, but seriously impressive, study in Hey Colossus as a band prepared to lead us into a new dimension.
The degree to which all this is appreciable depends entirely on your own musical compass. You would be pretty hard pressed not to find elements of something you like on ‘Cuckoo Live Life like Cuckoo’, but then you could easily be forgiven if it’s all a bit too much for you as well. Hey Colossus have stripped the inspiration cupboard pretty bare here. One senses that all their disparate musical fascinations have made it into this melting pot of a record, the result being something you can keep exploring for months, or even years to come, yet you may never fully understand it. Time to lose your mind...
'Cuckoo Live Life Like Cuckoo' is out now via MIE Records.
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Opener ‘Hot Grave’ makes for something of a case in point, managing to be groovy, heavy, relatively accessible and utterly mental all at the same time. It’s a bit like plunging the entire contents of your fridge into a blender and ending up with something not only edible but highly delicious. Whether such a result causes you to faint with shock or dive in headfirst is up to you. Head scratchers should be warned, however, that things only get weirder from this point on.
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