Beats and yelling: Kostnatění

Přílišnost (Excess)
Out 7^th November on Willowtip Records

Coming off the back of the adventurous ‘Úpal’ in 2023, the latest offering from Kostnatění is a case study in growing pains. Today’s release incontinence epidemic has rendered the difficult second album a thing of the past. There is no build up of digestive materials before the ultimate push, all content comes flowing out immediately and without control. Third albums still present a tricky prospect, however. By this point you have probably accumulated a following who come with their own matrix of expectations. This can make the third album a make or break affair. Setting the tone for years to come by either resting on established laurels or “becoming who you are” with adventurous insurgencies grounded in the stable foundation of a firm identity. As an artist ranging the experimental borders of black metal, regurgitating the things we loved about ‘Úpal’ with the follow up was never on the cards for Kostnatění. But there is yet too much of the shapeshifter present in this as yet still young artist to firmly orientate ourselves through a wildly experimental left turn.

The result is a kind of fudge of various competing impulses. Many of the same hallmarks are carried through on ‘Přílišnost’. An exercise in focused dissonant black metal, one veering wildly between noise rock, eccentric yet oddly disciplined melodic lines, and disruptive, nihilistic explosions of jagged avant-garde eruptions. Equally front and centre are the Middle Eastern folk lines delivered in soaring salvos as if to marshal the latent anomie of the material threads together to a place of grace. These elements could be seen as a continuation of ‘Úpal’, perhaps delivered with a level headed confidence that only slightly blunts their mysticism.

But Kostnatění, by accident or design, have also taken cues from the modern avant-garde current within metal which mistakes eclecticism for experimentation, shoving in random elements that at best don’t fit, at worst make a mockery of the album’s more cerebral outbursts. The drum and bass opener ‘Dokonalé křišťálové město (Perfect Crystal City)’ works on its own terms, a provocation to fans with expectations already locked and loaded. But it fails to link up with the uncanny atmospheres so skilfully articulated in the subsequent material. Slam riffs, hardcore breaks, and the frankly childish bratcore outbursts of the closing track, all speak of an artist clutching at straws to satisfy their restlessness.

Despite the “mixtape” approach to much of the writing, the mid-section of the album is a tour de force of originality, spontaneity, and a still latent discipline. But this only somewhat compensates for the frayed edges of ‘Přílišnost’, as it stretches itself between pandering to the modern audience’s base understanding of experimental music at one end, and cheap thrills and provocations for their own sake at the other. But within the catacombs of this album there can still be found an after echo of the artist that gave us ‘Úpal’ and ‘Oheň hoří tam, kde padl’, here upgraded into a more aggressive, swaggering, yet no less ethereal entity of modern extreme metal. Accepting the bipolarity and inconsistency is an occupational hazard in explicitly avant-garde music. Rewards still await those willing to peer between the folds.