3 out of 5

Label: Kuato Records, Coeur sur toi

Produced by: Peter Deimel (recorded and mastered by)

The excitement of Vantre’s debut, The Treehopper Sessions, was slow to trigger: a set of – by today’s Don Cabbed and Slint-ed standards – pretty “normal” instrumental post-rock backpedaled into badassness by incorporating little stylistic sidesteps along the way, which became more pronounced the more time you gave it.

Clonocracy is a somewhat funny title in that sense, as the lovely cover of bickering, mutated twins from Bjorn Atldax suggests a possible fate of making copies upon copies – things start to go wrong. And maybe we can interpret the ‘-ocracy’ as a kind of ruling method led by copy and paste cloning. Proving that I don’t pull everything out of my ass, there’s some verbiage to this on the bandcamp page: this is the soundtrack to a future world of cloning as the sole source of life.

Where I get back to pulling things out of my ass, though, is how I’m applying this to the music, as Clonocracy kind of sounds like Treehopper copied and pasted over. The intention is to streamline; to get rid of all those little mutations. As such, Clonocracy minuses out much of the stylistic sidesteps, except for the briefest sideglance at Dub Trio-esque dub on Karni Mata Temple. Elsewhere, the group burns through 8 tracks of fully focused rockers, once more blending Turing Machine momentum with guitar-forward rock like The Fucking Champs, dosed with occasional moments of post-rock overdrive.

…That doesn’t sound bad at all! It’s not. It rocks. But Treehopper was about Vantre differentiating themselves from other instrumental acts over the course of the album; Clonocracy finds them moving back into very familiar territory. It happens to be in a genre I adore, so I still gobble this stuff up, but I’d have a hard time differentiating most of the music here from a handful of other rockers in the same vein. On Vantre’s side is a great mix / master from recorder Peter Deimel and mixer Amaury Sauvé, and a down-to-business mentality that prevents any of these songs from wandering into excess. At the same time, the linear approach rather definitionally takes away the bits and bobs that might have me thinking of Vantre over various RIYL options.