Review Summary: Madness, I'm telling you! Madness.
The French virtuoso psychedelic magicians Kaviar Special have plagued my mind for a while now. Ever since their self-titled debut record and then its numerically titled follow-up, I could not wrap my head around how they do it, and also what is it they are doing exactly. It is some kind of crazy, trippy, fun, but also Huxley-dystopian and headache inducing lunacy. But with the release of their third album, they not only finally put effort in coming up with a name for it, but also diversify their sound enough for me to be able to dissect it.
So off we go to the first track, “Run Away”. Knowing the band’s previous work, it should be expected to hear some slight, distant pop-punk influences, but this song often seems like just a straightforward pop-punk affair, but with a subdued sonic blaster shrilling at the background all the time. That should already set the obscure course to anticipate throughout the entire record, for the fierce fuzzy frenzied fun is what comes forth on every single cut.
But a remarkable trait of each of those cuts is how the band delves into ever-so- slightly different direction, execution or melody-work. It makes the album marginally more versatile and intriguing than just a regular psychedelic trip. Those changes don’t have to be radical, they are often apparent only upon repeated listening. It can be a slightly more intense, hard rock-like ending on one song, then a more bluesy progression on the other, and then a somewhat stoner vibe from another. Thus we get from a punky opener to a relatively more traditional psych “How Come” or “Bursting at the Seams” on to wavy, shaking “Dead End”, which also indulges into that distant pop-punk inspiration in song-writing, and then there’s a sudden tangling country on “Back to School”, which immediately turns into a crazy-ass mind-bending fuzzfest, all then smothered in a Led Zeppelin worship on “Bedroom”.
So once again does the band construct a perfectly bewildering, wondrous, crazy and just damn entertaining album. Third time in a row, a great record. Although it doesn’t seem as though Kaviar Special were trying to create an album for ages, they inadvertently spawned out the most in-the-now album.
