Review Summary: Brutal-prog pioneers The Flying Luttenbachers reach their inevitable pinnacle, 12 years into their impressive career.
Cataclysm is without a doubt The Flying Luttenbachers’s first masterpiece. I know that is quite the message to insert into the opening remark of a music review, yet it is something I’m nevertheless wholeheartedly convinced of. In fact, I might go as far as to say that up until this point, The Flying Luttenbachers had not yet produced any musical material which might make one genuinely start grinning from ear to ear. This isn’t to say that the outfit’s output was hitherto the release of Cataclysm nothing more than a series of failed experiments, but, as far as I’m concerned, their earlier oeuvre doesn’t represent the most astonishing the band has to offer. The band’s main creative force and only constant member, multi-instrumentalist, Weasel Walter seems to agree with me on this matter. Speaking of Cataclysm in a Bandcamp interview he had this to say: “Cataclysm is—as far as the narrative, the arc and the scope of the music—if I had to listen to one record of the band, I’d point to that one immediately, like, ‘That’s what the Flying Luttenbachers is about.’ It was a band where I was trying to make the most challenging, visceral music. Whether it was drawing on no-wave, extreme metal, free jazz or classical, it was me trying to be really modernist and obnoxious.”[1]. Granted,
obnoxious, challenging modernistic isn’t necessarily a descriptor that would be inapplicable to The Flying Luttenbachers’ earlier material either, yet it is on Cataclysm that the band’s musical style is embodied in the most unequivocally impressive manner. A musical style pioneered by the The Flying Luttenbachers itself, which is usually characterised by a moniker devised by Weasel Walter himself: Brutal Prog.
That being said, the application of terms like obnoxious, challenging and modernisitic in a musical context might not impart as clearly as is desirable, exactly what type of sonic assault The Flying Luttenbachers usually hurl at the listener on every single one of their releases. A concise description of Brutal prog, which at the same time might function as an appropriate distillation of the group’s sound, would be: a style of music typified by a combining of the sonic excessiveness of noise rock, hardcore punk, no wave and extreme metal and the extemporaneous nature of free jazz with the cerebral approach of genres like progressive rock and math rock [2]. It is perhaps no surprise that Weasel Walter managed to bring his idiosyncratic musical ideas to new heights with Cataclysm, given the all-star line-up that constituted the four-piece for the recording of the album: guitarists Ed Rodriguez (Deerhoof) and Mike Barr (Krallice) and seasoned bassist Mike Green (Burmese). Of course, Walter himself was present for percussion duties as well as the occasional guitar, bass and mellotron work. Every single one of these musicians was no stranger to crafting extreme, experimental music and possessed the high levels of dexterity required to weave their way through Cataclysm’s intricate compositions and meticulous yet frenetic instrumental work.
Nevertheless, to even make a superficial attempt to properly delineate the constituent properties of the titular The Flying Luttenbachers sound, is perhaps a fool’s errand. A statement that rings true more so than ever, as far as Cataclysm is concerned. The record is an absolute musical and emotional rollercoaster through exceedingly detailed yet prodigiously chaotic musical landscapes. Weasel Walter’s drumming performance on this record is nothing short of magnificent, as he provides continuous shifts between complex oddly-ramified rhythmical structures and furious extreme metal burst typified by overwhelmingly dense double-bass flurries, ripping blast beats and tumultuous drum fills. Barr and Rodrigeuz on the other hand, provide soul-shattering moments of musical modernism on their guitars, with string-screeching atonal and dissonant scorchers and eye-piercing tremolo sequences. Mike Green grinds underneath this musical madness with sickeningly distorted baselines which cause one’s facial skin tissue to transmogrify into a foul physiognomy which will signal to any onlooker that the baselines are indeed, to put it bluntly, THICK. Add to this the highly staccato, syncopated stop-and-go antics that are already present in spades during the record’s first track, their quixotic twists and turns overcutting rumbling baselines and syncopated snare work, and you start to realise just how wild of a musical rollercoaster ride this record presents. The force of the music totally exhausts the listener and you will be hard pressed to push yourself through this record in a single listen. However, it is to be remarked that the sheer overwhelming nature of this music is, if anything, a testament to its resounding success in managing to be, as Weasel Walter put it, visceral, challenging, obnoxious, modernist. In short: it reaches its intended aesthetic goals with utmost competence.
In this sense, when listening to Cataclysm one can starts to realise just how aptly named all of the record’s tracks are, as if Weasel Walter and co. decided to pre-emptively inform the listener just what sort of sonic lunacy was waiting for them. The insane velocity and hyper-precise drumming of ‘Demonic Velocity’, the horrific, mechanical, atonal grinding of ‘Insektoid Horror’, the meandering, atonal, vacuous sludge of ‘From Oblivion’, the belligerent noise-rock-on-steroids insanity of ‘Interstellar War’ and the texturally rich, grating yet ethereal build-up of ‘Movement Four of L'ascension’, all seem to reveal a perfectly harmonious relationship between track title and track content. It is that last track which serves, in a way, as a gargantuan prelude to the record’s ending two-parter: ‘Regime (part 1 & 2)’. The first part is without a doubt the record’s most harrowing sonic journey and also happens to be the only track on
Cataclysm entirely performed by Weasel Walter himself. Not only is it a monumental display of multi-instrumentalism, it’s without a doubt one of the best penultimate tracks ever put to record: break-neck drumming, weird-as-all-hell, abrasive atonal and dissonant guitar passages, exceedingly strange stop-and-go builds, wonderful chamber music abstractions, an enveloping atmosphere and an engrossing texture. It’s truly fantastic.
It also serves to reaffirm another most admirable quality of record: the production. The overwhelmingly nasty guitar tone, the gratifyingly snappy-sounding snare and the fantastically dense bass sound aside, the mixing on this record is absolutely stellar: while every instrument is accorded just the sufficient amount of space required to prevent every single song from devolving into an unintelligible cacophonous slob, the record nevertheless sounds massively dense and impenetrable at times. The productions manages to perfectly marry both the album’s textural and atmospheric sensibilities, as well as it’s cerebral yet vociferously frenetic approach. It is no wonder then, that Weasel Walter felt confident enough in the quality of this record to denote it as the band’s biggest accomplishment thus far. This release is without a doubt an incredible accomplishment within the realm of experimental music that reaches a sonic excessiveness of a sheer unprecedented nature and, in doing so, transcends musical boundaries heretofore seemingly insurmountable. Indeed, Catacysm is not merely an 'apex', but a modern classic.
Sources:
[1]: https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/weasel-walter-list, accessed on 19 June 2020.
[2]: https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/brutal-prog-guide, accessed on 19 June 2020.
