4 out of 5

Label: Auris Apothecary

Produced by: Carl Byers (recorded and mastered by)

One of the few times I was literally blackout drunk, when I woke the next day, I found my room completely rearranged – posters torn down; items on shelves mixed around; cabinets completely moved. My roommate described hearing shouts at an ungodly hour, debating with the person with whom I’d been imbibing about where things in the room should go.

This is kind of what I feel like the effects of Kata Sarkar are: whether or not crust or hardcore or thrash is your thing, these four blasts of animosity are capable of transporting you to some huffed up state – mindless, blacked out – and when the noise ends, you will wake to find you’ve conquered a small country or something.

Check out that title. The Auris Apothecary packaging seals a CDr (a black-backed CRr, of course) in a sealed envelope, glued to a goddamned slab of tile. It exudes severity.

The lyrics are a slew of pessimism, of course, but I credit the lyricist with not just doing the black metal thing of growling loosely connected imagery – each song, though very topically similar, can be said to have a fairly focused theme, and it’s not just stream-of-consciousness bile, but rather a bit of a manifesto. I’d almost call the lyrics hopeful in an odd way; they don’t sound like “nothing will ever change so die” bleakness so much as a pissed off call to awareness.

On the music side, this stuff annihilates. I remember hearing Nails for the first time and being blown away by the utter intensity; this is that with the musical chops of Converge, played at nigh-Discordance Axis speeds (and with some grindcore aspects in there, for sure). But if you want a description in a pinch, it’s probably one of the grand daddies of thrash: Slayer. Played growlier and faster. My issue with this kind of music is that its lack of variation can get tiresome over the course of an album; sensing this Kata Sarkar not only keep it short, but line up the tracks so that they get shorter and shorter as we go along. On the flip-side, while I dig the aesthetic of the fuzzed up recording, where everything is mastered to bleeding levels, the group stuffs a whole bunch of really crazy guitar / bass / drums interplay, and I think a more nuanced recording would enhance the mind-blowing qualities, and make this something that could’ve easily extended past four tracks.

Though maybe as-is is best – I can only conquer so many countries.