Karmant - Riot in Uniform (2021)

Country: Bangladesh
Style: Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Apr 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

It's a shrinking globe. Here I am, over five thousand miles west of home listening to an EP submitted to me from Bangladesh, which is a further eight thousand miles west. It's odd to discover that Dhaka is actually closer to where I was born than where I live. And yes, I reviewed some thrash metal earlier in the week with the new Torture Squad, but that was a short EP and this one isn't much longer, so the two together add up to an album in my book. Fortunately, this is more consistent in its genre.

I wouldn't have thought of Bangladesh as a hotbed of metal, but I'm fast learning that there are a lot of excellent extreme metal bands in southeast Asia, from other bands in Bangladesh like Kaal Akuma through Elcrost in Vietnam down to the death metal haven of Indonesia, though my highest rating for that country went to an atmospheric black metal album by Pure Wrath. Now I can add Karmant to the list because they they play a varied form of thrash that's often agreeably fast, which makes it right up my alley.

The opener, Nuclear Outbreak, is the fastest and best song here, but it's neatly varied, even finding a groove metal vibe during the midsection. It's led in by a siren and then machine gun fire, which turns out to not be machine gun fire in the slightest, because it's excellent drumming from a gentleman by the name of Naweed. I have to admit that I spent a while simply listening to these drums. Naweed is a perfect drummer for a thrash band, because he can play at any tempo they want to go, shift gears like there's no tomorrow and never seem to be approaching the limit of his speed.

What makes Karmant so promising is that he's not the only perfect fit here. Rumman and Zamil play a tightly woven pair of guitars and the more intricate work, like the intro to General Destroyer, is easily as enjoyable, while Zami has a few opportunities in the spotlight for his bass, one in the opener and a second on Greed, plus a really nice section early in the second half of General Destroyer. It's not hard to track his bass throughout and he rumbles nicely behind the guitars in quieter bits of the title track and others. Musically, this band is excellent, even if they formed only five years ago and this is their debut EP. All the various instrumental stretches are highlights for me.

The worst thing about this EP is that it ends, without a natural stopping point. It feels less like a four track EP and more like the first four tracks of an album and I was ready to keep going into the last half a dozen. I'd also call out Zami's vocals as a lesser aspect too, though not a negative. I was surprised to find that he sings in English and he seems fluent, though there's clearly an accent there. However, he has a punky approach that works much better in slower, churning sections than it does on the sprints. My guess is that he thinks of himself as a bass player who sings rather than a vocalist who plays bass.

Thanks to Farhan, who kindly sent this EP over to me for review. I like Karmant a lot and look forward to a full album. This is an indie release and I'm still learning about how deep the fanbase is over there in southeast Asia, so I hope this finds a global audience. Torture Squad formed over thirty years ago, but I'd take this debut EP over that band's Unknown Abyss in a heartbeat.

Kaal Akuma - In the Mouth of Madness (2021)

Country: Bangladesh
Style: Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 18 Jan 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

Here's something interesting from Bangladesh, courtesy of a death metal trio called Kaal Akuma, who are on their debut album. I'm not sure how new this material is, as at least one track was released as a single in 2019, the year they were formed, but it really doesn't matter because this is old school stuff, the sort of early death metal that was dismissed by many people, only to prove massively influential to entire subgenres. If I'd heard this in 1985, I'd have spun it alongside Seven Churches until the cows came home.

Excluding the final track, Yamantaka, which I'll get to later, the band seem to function in two modes.

The first is fast and heavy and it's how they tend to start out songs. Everything's tuned deep and low and it's delivered without compromise. They aren't the sort of band to banter with the audience, just get their heads down and launch into their next song without any fuss. The music very much does the talking and anyone listening is either going to drift away from the wall of sound unimpressed or let it seep into their soul as if it's a mission statement they've just bought off on. The tone is massively important and it's that old school evil tone, dripping in ichor, that still sounds so delicious to me.

The second is much slower, achingly slower, and it arrives in variants of extremity. Mostly, like in the middle of songs like Feast on Mortals or Master of Metnal, it manifests as relentlessly slow riffs in a similar tone, which only serves to make the sound more evil. I'd call it doom metal but the tone's still death, whatever speed it's unfolding as. Sometimes, though, Akif fully unleashes his guitar and solos so eerily and so consumed by wild feedback that this starts to resemble drone metal or what we could call ambient death. The end of Black Death Sacrifice fits that bill, during which I started to feel like I was the sacrifice, both before and after the act.

That's not what the lyrics say, of course, but that sort of narrative epic fits what Kaal Akuma do. There are only five songs on offer here, but the album doesn't skimp. The shortest song is the closer, which is still well over six minutes and the title track lasts almost ten. Lyrically, we're actually in interesting territory, approaching the genre's traditional overblown affectation for death through Asian plague, Lovecraftian horror and Mayan sacrifice. I should point out that Metnal is not the typo we might see it as; it's the name of the underworld for the Mayans of the Yucatan peninsula, equivalent to Xibalba to those further south.

And talking of death gods, as we apparently are, that brings us to the final piece of music, which isn't so much a song as an instrumental folk death ritual. It's called Yamantaka, which, as those who took a glorious trip with me into last year's Neptunian Maximalism triple album, is the Sanskrit name of the destroyer of death in Vajrayana Buddhism. I should add that this isn't as dark as it sounds, because it sounds frickin' dark; destroying death is the final step taken to end the cycle of rebirth and reach the state of enlightenment.

I adored this piece of music, which is the icing on the cake that is this album. It highlights that, while the band may remind of Possessed meeting early Bathory, there's an avant-garde mindset throughout that has to be traced back to Celtic Frost. That all those names are formative ones is telling to me.

I'm sure that today, this is just one death metal album in a swamp of death metal albums, struggling to make itself known, especially given its source. How many sixteen year old western kids are working through the Bangladeshi death metal scene right now? But I'm hearing this as something out of time, the sort of mid-eighties sidestep from the expected that went on to launch entire genres of music. It's primal stuff that feels like the beginning of something rather than the end. Maybe it will be.

Oboyob - Abirbhab (2019)

Country: Bangladesh
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 31 May 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | YouTube

A psychedelic rock album from Bangladesh? Yeah, I'm in for finding out what that sounds like! And it sounds pretty good. Oboyob were founded as Chaotic Symphony in 2009 and renamed a year later to the more appropriate Oboyob, a word which apparently means "indistinct form or figure". I like it. With its bonus track, Abirbhab runs just shy of an hour and, even though it's often laid back, it never gets boring. In fact, each listen is more involving.

Ambitiously, it begins with the longest song on offer, Upolobdhi, which at almost ten minutes is certainly an exercise in patient build. Initially, it reminds of Cream's Tales of Brave Ulysses because of how the melodies run, but the overall sound is closer to a relaxed Pink Floyd. The middle section allows for extended soloing over a simple but effective beat. Opening with a ten minute song is a gamble but this one paid off.

While the majority of the album continues to be patient, merely at shorter lengths, the band don't stay there throughout and patient doesn't have to mean quiet or soft. The finale of Ditiyo Shotta is particularly frantic and that opens up with a pondering bass and playful drums, before the guitars join in to make the whole thing playful. The band know how to experiment, but they're comfortable enough doing so that they often make it feel very, deceptively, simple.

What they do best, I think, though, is to trawl the history of rock music for ideas to roll into their original sound. Every time I feel that I know where they got a particular feel, they change it into another one. Ditiyo Shotta, for example, has a Clash-esque punky sound for a while but it moves away from that, into prog territory and even adds a fantastic double bass run to wrap it all up. It builds gloriously, one of the aspects of this album I enjoyed the most.

Oboyob cite many influences, not just the expected prog and psych bands of the seventies or earlier, but more recent alternative names like the Verve, Chris Rea and Porcupine Tree too and it's this mix that helps them find an original sound. 1980 seems to be a real dividing line in influence, with a lot of bands taking their sounds from either side. Oboyob refuse to choose sides because they like both. This is a band who take influence from both Pink Floyd and Radiohead, but shift back and forth between those eras when each particular song requires it.

There's a lot more to their sound though. I heard a lot of Marillion here too, though alternative Marillion rather than overt prog Marillion. It's in certain transitions but it's especially in the vocals with the singer (and I don't know which of the two it is) on Oronne... Kolponay... reminiscent of Steve Hogarth. The bonus track, Shada-Kalo, has an old school U2 flavour with a little of the Pixies' Wave of Mutilation, the UK Surf version. These are clearly alternative in nature.

However, the album also gets heavy at points. Otopor Bastobota begins as a deceptively simple song but it adds in real urgency through a vicious guitar tone underneath the soloing. It's not metal but it and the song to follow, Shadhinota, are as close to metal as the album gets. Shadhinota starts out funky and then adds in a riff that reminds of Symphony of Destruction. For a rock band, they're a pretty good metal band too.

In short, there's a lot that's reminiscent here, sounds that run the gamut from Cream to Megadeth, but it's so mixed together that none of the tracks feel derivative. At the end of the day, Oboyob sound like Oboyob and that's an important thing for a debut album.

What I didn't hear was anything overtly local in flavour. I'm not sure what the band's Bangladeshi influences sound like but when I caught world sounds within songs, they aren't particularly eastern. The first half of Nogor o Nagorik, for instance, feels like Jethro Tull channelling Caribbean music, something I never thought I'd write.

This isn't a problem, I should add, but I'm going to continue to wonder what Bangladeshi psychedelic rock sounds like because this feels like psychedelic rock that merely happens to be performed by a band from Dhaka. What matters is that it's very good psychedelic rock. I'll be exploring this album for a while.