Albatre - The Fall of the Damned

2018 release

Albatre are back for some more «display of urgent bass and sax noise, frantic but meticulous drumming and abrupt moodshifts», but this self-description doesn’t say it all. Something changed in this Rotterdambased band formed by two Portuguese, Gonçalo Almeida and Hugo Costa, and a German, Philipp Ernsting, since the release of “A Descent Into Maesltrom”.

They’re still crossing post-Ornette Coleman free jazz with metal and punk, but now the music is more essential and minimalist, with everything reduced to the bone. And yet, the doom factor is enhanced as never before. The riffs are slowly (sometimes very, very slowly) repeated until you get hypnotized, a bit like Otomo Yoshihide’s band Ground Zero used to do, and when something different happens – colorful harmonic cloud formations and harsh noise fusing in strange ways – it’s like discovering a new planet.

There’s aspects of jazzrock and of psychedelic and progressive rock going on, but what’s really important is the final impact on your stomach: the music strikes you there directly. With “The Fall of the Damned”, the jazzcore format goes to new territories.