Album Review: Triskelyon - Maelstrom of Chaos
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
There’s nothing like a good thrash album, and unfortunately, this is nothing like a good thrash album. On paper the songs sit in this “pretty good” space - nothing classic but above average. In practice though this just disintegrates. It’s not as though everything is terrible, but the things that are good about it are often executed in this slack, cack-handed manner that proves additionally frustrating because you can see the good things peeking through breaches in the mire, but they’re never permitted to fully surface. The idea to conclude “Cretin” (probably the best track on here) with this spacey, drifting bit of psychedelic lead work is a readily defensible one. But in practice what you get is this skronky marathon of tapping and whammy bar fondling that sounds like Kerry King joined Hawkwind. The brief snatches of black metal are refreshing but also serve to highlight how schizophrenically disorganised the rest of the album is, and the vocals are this attention deficit patchwork of frequently out of tune approaches astonishing in it’s incohesion.
It's quite hard to track guitars during a recording. It feels like it should be easy, but when you get down to it nailing the timing on even moderately complex passages can be a challenge. So I’m not coming into this all piss and vinegar as if I myself could nail this stuff but you can blatantly hear the guitar tracks slipping and sliding all over each other like they’re mud wrestling. It becomes agonisingly obvious if you listen to the album on one headphone then the other, just how loose the playing is. Not so bad when the album yanks a number out a bag and decides it’s full speed black metal time, but in other areas where precision is at a premium it’s such a diverting thorn in the side. And I know I haven’t bemoaned sloppiness in a fair few other reviews, shit, I reviewed Cadaver’s reissued debut recently and half the songs on that thing have no idea what tempo anyone is supposed to be at. But Cadaver were playing something much more forgiving towards inaccurate timing, and the same standard can’t be held for Triskelyon when their music hinges far more on scalpel swipe dexterity than sledgehammer barbarity. It’s not helped by how muddy and muffled the guitar tone is, and how jarring it sounds paired with the plastic slap of the drum machine snare sample.
The vocals are versatile, but that’s not always for the best. Some of the highs sound like you’re circumcising king diamond with a pencil sharpener in a room full of helium, whereas “Blame Game” starts with this blustering “BeeYeEeEeEeEeEeAaAaAaHhHhHh” that sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear if you asked Jack Black if he secretly really enjoys getting a prostate exam. Elsewhere, “Cretin” sticks with this druidic, echoing yell not a thousand miles off something that you might hear on a Conan album, but then at other moments (“Death Racer”) it’s a facsimile of Dave Mustaine’s “I’m watching you in the shower” sneer. The vocalist’s vibrato quivers as though he’s trying to nail karaoke while wild boar chase him barefoot over a floor covered in lego, and while he has impressive range he’s not always on key, so there’s this awkward, bothersome sense that he’s capable of singing these songs flawlessly but he’s instead missing these notes just enough to damage sections that are at least potentially cool.
I just find myself getting a bit lost for words with this whole release. The amount of times I’ve been driving along listening to it and glanced over at the stereo with this incredulous look as if I expect the car to have any idea what the fuck is going on either is beyond count at this point, because bits of this feel like total chaos without really meaning to be. It all comes to a head of sorts with the final track, a cover of Peter Schilling’s classic pop bop “Major Tom”. From the chugs after the triplet in the verse / intro riffs being a touch languid, to the vocals on the chorus being out of key, to the clicking drumkit to the duvet the guitars were recorded through. You see, the problem is that the album appears to be drunk. But not just any drunk. Not cutesy-wutesy “one too many chardonnays at the baby shower but between paracetamol, lucozade and a lie-in we’ll be good to go tomorrow” drunk. No. This is bar fights at 4am, taxi hijacking and kidney transplants drunk. That “stomach pumps at dawn” type of drunk where your blood type is “Irish” and half your BMI is kebab meat. I can see what was aimed for, and the enthusiasm of it does inject a modicum of compelling exuberance, but sadly it’s flattened by a landslide of production and performance missteps that leave me struggling to recommend this to anyone with ears.
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