We open on an empty street as a semblance of light streams between the two spires of the Basler Münster Cathedral. The cold wind gives the trees a gentle tussle. The reflections in the puddles shake with an immutable unrest. It is a quiet dawn, the city vibrating with a certain fretfulness. The picture is askew struggling to focus. The lens refracts and lights with the flick of a cigarette as some figures slowly start to enter the frame.
Since essentially 2003, when Zatokrev entered the proverbial frame with their violent albeit expansive sound, reverberations have continued to pulse below the ground with their keen expression of acoustics and space. Never just the hammer or the anvil—they have honed a certain dynamic range of assault that doesn’t simply bludgeon—but unravels a deeper swerved sense of paranoia, joy and longing.
Zatokrev’s new work …Bring Mirrors To The Surface sees the band break a seven year silence notwithstanding Frederyk Rotter’s other projects like AlyoshA, the acoustic The Leaving, live activities in Ashtar and power-lifting 240kg with ease. Swirling around the Czar of Crickets of Basel is a frequency of a who’s-who of the Swiss scene. Okoi of Bolzer, Christian Ruf of Schammasch, the composer Ines Brodbeck, Manuel Gagneux of Zeal & Ardor, the dudes from Minsk all make an appearance on this record.
The substance and alloy is palpable. Heavy, ethereal, free—tracks like “Blood” traverse some Chi and Chino rivers, boiling in the wash of shoegaze passages that would put Steve Brooks to shame. Alternating between bombast and reticence, a doorway is opened to affable melodies recalling a melancholy stashed away in corners rarely affirmed by the genre. Traveling into the blasting of “The Only Voice”, there is life-affirming undercurrent that uplifts into a pale sky that finally has witnessed its first rays of sunshine only to return to earth in a chrome bulldozer leveling forests and fields—arriving at a clearing of guitar pyro where the stalks of barley burn from the electricity of every line.
“Unwinding Spirits” drifts into a Floydian surge before the evil spirit takes over. Uncompromising, foreboding, the voices chant out of the darkness beckoning to be unleashed upon the world. And yet, somewhere in the distance, there is a veneer of hope and recovery from the husk of a begotten planet. “Faint” would firmly slither around the rehearsal room of Gavin Harrison and Colin Edwin as David Yow repeatedly smashes his head into the insulated wall, concrete chipping into a bowl of blood, sweat and tears. There are significant amounts of blast beats throughout this pantheon to confidently make any idealist or purist do a double take.
There is volume, there is depth, there is density. Everything feels like it is constantly and consistently building upon itself to an apex that almost feels unreachable. As the ascent roams, birds with broken wings wobble from various directions, rocks fall down from cliffs, ashes carry smoke into the city from the tops of the split trees. Smoke engulfs and you start to suffocate from the elements. This is a mirror coming to the surface. A city unable to look upon itself as darkness descends. The puddles have melted away. The wind no longer blows. The figures collapse into the distance.
