Review Summary: Smother me in horror.
Once Conduct, now Kandekt, the Manitoba band delves into ever stranger territories on their latest record. Their previous effort,
Fear and Desire, cleverly combined dark and brooding nature of the heavier side of post-punk with a visceral musical disintegration of post-hardcore. But if artists’ name changes have shown us anything in the past, then it is that they also carry a change of style with them. In Kandekt’s case it is more of a structural transition. Where
Fear and Desire was a frantic maniacal spawn of frustration and craziness,
History As It Is Happening presents a complete mental breakdown, paranoid and frenzied. It is no longer an exercise in rapid weirdness, but a straight down brutalist horror.
From the opening intro “A Living” you are thrown into this peculiar world, where melody is just a formality and vocals are meant to disturb with their dysrhythmia and agitation. But you will experience insanity first only at the following cut, “Da Yue Jin”, where the instrumental turmoil grows into grosser and grosser obscurity, until it erupts like a volcano of dissonance with almost metallic undertones.
Generally, the songs here don’t span out longer than two minutes, but even on the shortest cuts the distortion –atmospheric, not musical – is multi-layered. But the longer ones are where the real storm awaits. Considering how turbulent and musically diverse everything before was, listening to “The Immigrant” feels like experiencing the entire album all over again. But after that and the incredibly dizzying outro “The Immigrant” had, the album suddenly tries to normalise (as far as something as inherently abstract and absurd as this could). “Verdens Dag” and “The Fujian Tulou” are surprisingly straightforward, whereas “Xiamen” feels more like an indoors field recording session interlude. It is only the final track, the eight minutes long “Pax Americana”, who finally brings in some layered song-writing in the second half of the album. However, its layered nature comes not from unconventional, psychotropic weirdness, but from the dismal straightforwardness. A pattern can be observed, where “The Immigrant” encapsulates the first half’s mania, and “Pax Americana” nit-picks the transitioned sound into a more traditionally post-punky regions.
It is a Valkyrie of an album. It doesn’t shoot for the stars; in fact it deliberately digs itself a hole and lies in it with hopes that someone covers it. There is no hidden beauty and there is no subtle triumph, there is only the decay of the abstract world of strict lawful cruelty the band presents. And it is mind-twisting.
