Staff Reviews

Zun Zun Egui - Katang

Review by Jazz Monroe

Remember that time you stood slightly aghast in the streets of a major European city, watching a man with a wrong hat and probably no home doing a Lotus Flower-dance to a vast cacophony of apparently-no-music-whatsoever? This is probably what he was listening to, it just didn’t exist yet.»

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'katang', the debut album by zun zun egui, is a blazing example of all that's great about modern music and creates a graphic and dynamic picture of the sound beyond the mainstream. 'katang' captures the sound of the liberated state of zun zun, the mind-frying, dust-raising chaos of their live sound not neutered, but harnessed for maximum recorded potency. it's a thrilling 50 minute headrush of open-ended rock music: songs are stretched precisely as drumskin-taut as they need to be: riffs are rusted down to some bounteous silt region between metal and blues; melodic multi-lingual incantations are delivered in french, english, creole, japanese and at points pure nonsense ("because vocalised sound still has a lot of power on its own, without linguistic meaning attached", says kushal): a rainbow shower of sonics sparks around the mix, and a coronary pulse of rhythm and groove throbs upfront and ever-present. yet, for the most lyrical portrayal of this music ignore the above and head straight for yoshino's accompanying artwork: soulful, chaotic and ablaze with colour, it paints the sound of the band beyond words.
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