“And now, something simple and charming!” It’s always great to see a band like KUHN FU bringing out more craziness to the table when it comes to the sounds of jazz, cabaret, punk, avant-garde, and the Rock In Opposition movement. They’re a band that won’t take shit from anybody. Wackiness? Check! Zappa-like ornaments? Check! Elements of Henry Cow, Danny Elfman, Slapp Happy, Magma, and Fripp-like orientations? Check, check, and triple check!
KUHN FU are their own genre. Their latest gem entitled Katastrofik Kink Machine, which almost sounds like something straight out of a Ren & Stimpy short, the Fleischer shorts of Betty Boop, or the Bob Clampett years of Looney Tunes shorts in the 1940s, they bring their end game to the masses when it comes to creating chaos and insane textures that’s like a stick of dynamite, ready to explode at any second.
‘Low and Slow’ starts off with a crawling guitar arrangement, followed by sax, drums, and bass keeping the tempo down until it increases a bit more and more with blaring results. You feel each step gets even bigger and bigger from its mid-fast to dancing in the Berlin streets at night with incredible results. The haunting opening ‘Waffle House’ which we all know, has a shit load of chemicals here in the States which are not healthy for your body when your order something from their restaurants. But KUHN FU ignite the fuse as the sax make the explosions worth checking out.
It becomes a burst of heavy riffs between them and Christian’s guitar textures before Esat’s bass becomes an intense walking environment. It becomes a swinging shuffle between the band members, channeling each other into a duel to see who will make it towards the finish line. Those saxes add in those wildly improvisations to add each and every screech like a maddening insane person, ready to attack with blood in his veins.
There are elements between Manfred Mann Chapter Three’s ‘Travelling Lady’ and Present’s Le Poison Qui Rend Fou as Christian honors the late, great Roger Trigaux in this track when they do a stop-and-go routine in the piece as it becomes even more batshit crazy in the Crimson motif, a-la ‘Fracture’ style, but with a Cabaret twist of James Brown’s arrangements.
‘Die ID’ sits close to the edge with a spaghetti western atmosphere. With its Atom Heart Mother-like approach that builds in the epic scoring settings, the saxes take on a spiritual journey to be a part of this movie that the band envisioned inside their heads as if they’re continuing where The Man with No Name trilogy had left off, honouring Sergio Leone’s legacy and Ennio Morricone as well.
Then, its back into the Crimson forms once more. Christian has studied the forms of Robert Fripp very well as the galloping nightmares become more of a rumbling motif behind ‘Kink’ when everything starts to go into a hellish scene of the blood bath that’s happening across the land while landing in the under watery ‘Enigma’ as you swim down and down into the abyss, revealing your childhood, your life, and atmospheric coolness to give the band a little break from the craziness they’ve occurred.
The closing track as I’ve mentioned in the intro, ‘Simple and Charming’ has this hypnotic snark charmer approach that Christian allows his reptilian mastermind to take the world in order with massive amounts of snakes filling the entire globe with a Cabaret approach set in the steampunk universe of the 1920s. “Is this a funeral or what?!” Christian becomes a mad scientist once the tempo increases with his guitar going up the spiral staircase in mid-fast momentum!
This here is another compelling release KUHN FU have unleashed from their previous work. And yet it seems whenever they release an album, you never know what to expect. Is it mad to the bone? Oh hell, yeah!
