John Peel may have been a fan, but something that few seem to recall or dare to say is that while he broke countless bands and championed the weird, wonderful and extreme – for which there’s so much to be grateful - Peel also played an awful lot of crap.
That isn’t to say that Bong-Ra’s latest effort, ‘Monolith’ is crap. In fact, it’s arguably one of the most radical and adventurous, genre-smashing things I’ve heard in a fair while. But part and parcel of that is a challenging listen, and it’s often hard to be certain if it’s a work of genius or an addled hybrid mess.
Divided into two distinct parts – ‘Alpha’ and ‘Omega’, each of which contains four tracks – ‘Monolith certainly lives up to its name. Heavyweight hip-hop with shuddering breakbeats and grating industrial electronic noise dominate the first four of the eight tracks here. Featuring the vocal skills of Sole on all four movements, there’s no denying the intensity of ‘Inspiration’.
Stylistically, the two halves of the album are utterly distinct: ‘Dawn Of The Megalomaniacs ’ – ostensibly the first track on side two in old-school terms (being 2012, the vinyl edition of ‘Monolith’ comes as two heavyweight 12” singles, which effectively reconfigures the album as a pair of contrasting and complimentary EPs, which works well) – begins with crushing industrial percussion and a metallic guitar sound worthy of early Swans before taking off on a completely different trajectory of high-energy pounding industrial techno-metal. More KMFDM than Wu Tang, building to a chugging frenzy of Ministry at their most furious.
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Through the whiplash-inducing metal mosh of ‘Darkness / Artificial Flesh ’ and the frenetic grimy techno-metal of ‘Fallen Sons ’ and culminating in the piledriving barrage of overdriven techno that is ‘Crawlers’, Bong Ra really bring the aggression and hit like a freight train.
Whether it’s an entirely enjoyable experience I’m too dazed to be sure, but it certainly makes for one helluva ride.
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