Hard to believe, but it has been nearly fifteen years since O.R.k launched back in 2011. A collaborative force combining the gurus of Porcupine Tree, King Crimson, and Marta sui Tubi. With four studio albums in the can from labels such as Hard World, RareNoise, and landing on the Kscope label with its alternative, heavy, electronic, and nightmarish arrangements to the outer worlds and beyond, they never released a bad album since.
That and their latest album Firehose of Falsehoods, proves that O.R.k have taken it a step further by walking into deeper territories that can cut you like a knife. The term that is named after the new album, is a propaganda technique in which numbers of messages that have broadcasted repeatedly on a loop like cable news, social media, without setting the complete utter truth on what’s going on behind closed doors. Orwell once said that “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history”.
And that’s what O.R.k is doing on this album; the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea per se, but the way that the centrepieces hold into the compositions, it’s like a bolt of lightning, ready to strike at any second. The rising ‘Blast of Silence’ bursts through the flood gates with powerful guitar riffs, wailing vocalisations, explosive drum patterns, spaghetti-western acoustic guitars, string-orientated arrangements, and revealing the vision of what 1984 endures.
Edwin goes into his post-punk attitude to give Lorenzo the ammunition he needs behind ‘Hello Mother’ where it goes towards a volcanic eruption, waiting to erupt at any second while ‘The Other Side’ evokes Porcupine Tree’s heavy arrangements from the Deadwing-era and tipping their hat into this film score orientation to the 1994 classic, The Crow.
But its’16,000 Days’ that gets things cooking. From its guitar-like Crimson orientation with touch as Lorenzo lets out a howl for the rhythm section to kick in as if he is caught in the middle of this war that’s going on. ‘PUTFP’ almost at first sounds like a Smashing Pumpkins-like battle from the Melon Collie years, but dives deeper into the oceans of the Undertow-era of Tool where we are looking at the screen of someone’s else’s life, living in this dystopian madness that’s unfolding in front of the movie goer’s eyes.
The steampunk blues gets down and dirty with an uneasy 20th century setting, diving up and down on the sky-lines to take you towards your next destination with an ascending and descending twist to an action-packed punch behind ‘Seven Arms’ then closing it out for the 14-minute ambient turned smoky jazz atmosphere to take over the aftermath that just occurred to ‘Dive In’.
It goes into the New Age sound, then walks into Bo Hansson’s Lord of the Rings segment and setting up the pandemonium occurring of the asylums of mental patients to be free from all of what had happened. Some are cured, some aren’t. And that’s how Firehose of Falsehoods has unveiled to us. This is not a happy story, this is a tragedy of someone built upon a lie and then crashing it down to reveal how much the citizens are trapped in this cube they’re stuck in, for a very long time.
