There is lore that exists about every place. No matter how famous or small, vast or strange sounding — when uttered by both foreign and local tongues, an even sea creates a tumultuous ripple.
Rochester. Once home to the Seneca tribe, the hub for abolitionists and now the Bug Jar, it served as a fabled nest of Lethargy, Lydia Lunch, Tony Levin and the like. When people mutter the expression “there is something in the water” when referencing a place that nourishes the creative contingents of a geography they rarely indulge in a place’s history so it’s important to consider that Rochester was one of the first boomtowns in America which literally fed the east coast with flour mills and developed manufacturing. The Eastman School of Music is also a vibrant kinetic lynchpin for the musical lifeforce that beckons at the mythos of this locale.
Urakka is part of this vibrating lifeforce. Self-dubbed as “Spacey Quirk Metal”, this five-piece with apt lovable pseudonyms like “Skromak”, “Professor” or“Pounder” to name a few, recalla a time when the Metal scene felt like a fun party only the chosen were invited to. Not unlike “Snake”, “Blacky”, “Away” these Prog-tinged water demons of the Genesee River operate at a wavelength clouded in smoke, synths and cyanide.
With lines like “The waves of piss and shit they send to drown our hearts and minds” and “I myself have never been one to pick up what the man sells / It used to be much easier to tell how the man smells.”
… there is a grit to this mathematical equation — the riffs in the opening “Spite Club” swirl around manic drums and Finny’s wails delivered in a beautiful marriage of Brutal Truth, Voivod and Helmet. The motherboard melts as they launch into a riotous solo. It’s math that gets you punched in the teeth for looking at it crooked, and this is just the beginning. There are pensive Ambient moments throughout that recall some alien wizardry staring back from the future into a crystal ball. “Flutes of the Void” push and pull in concentric circles that may rip the bark off a tree with a Goatsnake slithering around in its branches, and in the same sting of Kory Clarke’s bleeding eye of Warrior Soul-fame.
Free, uninhibited and angry as hell, Urakka fire on all cylinders on the Drain The Sky debut, as though nothing else mattered and all launch codes were activated already. There is a cynical sarcastic tone that will make you smile if you’re not prepared. This is Star Trek on crack. This is Birth Control on heroin. This is Acid Bath without a bath. There is a grand variability to this sound, a victory that feels futile and yet it still rides away into the horizon kicking dust up in everyone’s face. Riotgod in a Rush turbine this screams attitude, it screams courage, it screams — “your mind and your flesh are just playthings to pass his infinite time”!
As you pass this time, consider this work [of art] as the dust eventually settles.
