Triclops! - "Cafeteria Brutalia"
(Sick Room Records 2006, SRR 040, CDEP)
Triclops! - "Cafeteria Brutalia"
(Sick Room Records 2006, SRR 040, CDEP)
From Aural Innovations #35 (January 2007)
Triclops! are a guitar/bass/drums/vocals quartet that play a heavy rocking and tough to describe mixture of thrash-prog-math rock-metal-psychedelia. The aptly titled Cafeteria Brutalia is a 4 song 25 minute CDEP that despite it's brevity more than adequately demonstrates what Triclops! are all about.
"Mi Plisboy" starts off as a hard rocking thrash number with math rock sophistication and a wee bit of acid rock. But about halfway through it takes on a metal edge, before coming into a hard-psych meets indie rock landing. Lots of interesting twists and turns in this six minute tune and Triclops! manage to make it work seamlessly. "Jewel of Oakland" is a relentless thrash tune, chugging along like a freight train, throwing punk, prog, psychedelia and metal into a blender and spitting out the brain crushing results. The epic track on the EP is the nearly 11 minute "Bug Bomb". The guitars and thrash elements on this track remind me a lot of Finnish rockers Circle's earliest albums. Totally in-yer-face and the assault is ruthless. Yet there's a prog like sensibility to the composition and thematic shifts. "Bug Bomb" rocks and thrashes, but there's also some dark and gloomy acid-psych-metal segments that, for these guys anyway, are relatively atmospheric, but also some killer demonic hard-psych bits that turn on a dime into frenzied thrash… and then back again, and all the while with rappy Red Hot Chile Pepper styled vocals. The EP ends with "Salton", another cool thrash rocker.
Wow, these guys are ALL over the place. My head was spinning. And it really works well. It's tough to pigeonhole Triclop!, and that's what makes them so exciting. Damn good musicians, TIGHT band, total destruction of any sense of genre and musical style, and ass kicking edge-of-your-seat thematic transitions throughout their songs. Recommended.
For more information you can visit the Triclops! web site at: http://www.triclopsband.com.
Hear Triclops! at the Myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/triclopsband.
Visit the Sickroom Records web site at: http://www.sickroomrecords.com.
Reviewed by Jerry Kranitz