Control, hygiene, clarity, precision, perfectionism. Desire. Disquieting fantasies. Watch the video for "Snow White" then buy the album and listen to it one bar at a time, as if immersed in a forensically crucial search for truth in a sealed room.
What you can hear there is a band named after a Genesis song from 1976, performing an album named for the highest mountain in Sweden, a mountain that also gave its name to a progressive Swedish guitar band with not completely different aesthetics. Ice, altitude, clarity and dizziness are all implicated. On a clear day you can see nearly a tenth of Sweden from the peak of Kebnekaise.
Mat Haigh (vocals and guitar) wrote and sang the lyrics. Jonny Hey (bass / backing vocals), Ben Farnell (guitar) and Si Marks (drums) co-operated on composing and performing the music.
As a whole, Wot Gorilla?'s KEBNEKAISE is an obsessive work of timing and tone, working to a precision of several significant figures on every audible metric. James Kenosha's production and Hippocratic Mastering's enloudening talents leave every touch tap and tremor precisely as played and intended. The intensity of compulsion is far more emotional than I would have expected. There is lust and sweetness and beauty and maybe cruelty, all bundled up together. The hurtling flow of variation does not make for ambience or nurture: it's there to be listened to in a strictly serial way. The narrative comprises notes and sounds and spaces arranged in deliberate and disorienting sequences.
The impact, if you succumb, is delicate rather than bludgeoning. Distortion is saved for one or two deliberate moments. Separation maximises the audibility of each element. That final track "Snow White" is probably the outstanding single track on the album, reaching across the full range of Wot Gorilla?'s full talents and carrying some heavier energy to balance the twinklier moments of guitar duets that provide the signature sound.
I have listened to KEBNEKAISE as if it was a guitar album (which it certainly is). But not to mention Si Marks's intricate drumming would be criminal. Variation, swift changes, rich invention, it's all there.
