When promotion material for a 36-minute album describes it as “grueling”, you know you’re in for quite a ride.
And what a ride this album is, all the way from Seoul, South Korea, a country famous for gleaming K-pop, high-tech innovations and moreish fried chicken.
Let’s put Kuboa in terms of the above three Korean tropes. This band could be the monsters that the protagonists in K-Pop Demon Hunters are after – if the monsters were swamp-dwelling, slime covered, misanthropic longhairs.
Compared to a Samsung AI-enabled fold-in-half phone, this album is a piece of rock with a picture of a person howling in pain while dissolving because of hogweed poisoning (‘Hogweed’ is the name of one of the songs) scrawled in slate on it.
This is less deep-fried poultry morsels and more like beondegi, a Korean street food made out of steamed silkworm pupae. It smells something between an old dishcloth and an open sewer, but is wildly popular among acolytes of the snack.
Yes, Gawthrop’s music is filthy, it sounds as if it is being played at the wrong speed at times and is peppered with totally unintelligible lyrics, even if you know Korean. BlackPink it ain’t. But it is bloody marvellous.
The guitar, played by Hyunwoong, sounds as if it is tuned to the bottom of the bass clef and hooked up to every thickening, fuzzifying and crunchification effects pedal known to humankind. The bass is thicker than frozen maple syrup. The drums, courtesy of Owen, sound like they are being beaten with telephone poles. And the vocals – from bassist Sunggun – are piped from a pit far below the earth’s surface, where the daily diet is primordial ooze. It is sludge metal as it is supposed to sound.
But I have to disagree with the “gruelling” description. Because this album is a load of fun. It is a prime example of pushing metal to sludgy, crushing extremes without spilling over into gratuitous shock.
The album, the band’s debut, despite being in existence for over six years (they supported Eyehategod long, long ago), lumbers through songs with titles that are simultaneously nonsense yet perfectly descriptive. Who knows what ‘Bulbocapnine’, ‘Granfalloon’ or ‘Jumbo’ mean, but they fit the songs perfectly. But there is not only an adherence to repetitive, foul riffs, but also a groove – in a kind of ‘slow dancing with a giant blobfish in a mud-pit’ kind of way. And there is a flow to the album, from outright anger to despondence to a kind of reconciliation by the time ‘Jimmy’ with its disfigured shuffle drum beat comes along.
And the 57-second closing track ‘In Heaven’ sends the listener on their way with a motivational “In heaven, everything is fine, you’ve got your god and I’ve got mine” screamed by Sunggun over a surprisingly jaunty riff. Well, jaunty compared to the rest of the album.
In short, Kuboa is everything a decent scary sludge metal album should be. And we get to revel in it, while puzzling over why a band from Seoul name themselves after a pleasant hamlet in Cumbria, England. But that is a question for another time. Bring on the gruel.
