Friday 9 January 2015

Kooba Tercu - S/T (Album Review)

Kooba Tercu cover art

Album Type: Album
Date Released: 26th December 2014

Kooba Tercu – Track Listing

1.Ukunta 04:47
2.Elephant 04:15
3.Batman 04:15
4.Chika 03:14
5.Disembarkation 01:37
6.Squirting Squid 04:47
7.Pebble 05:36
8.Unaboom 03:21
9.Spit Bucket 02:10
10.Sonique 04:33

Bio

Kooba Tercu is Johnny Tercu and five other guys which he calls the crew.

Johnny Tercu and his crew spend time in a moist, rat & cockroach infested basement playing something loud and heavy. He ventures pointlessly into nothingness with the same sense of no future as most people in Athens these days.
After endless hours of jamming, Kooba Tercu has distilled the ideas developed over a couple of years in ten songs resulting in something that sounds incredibly familiar but maybe not quite like anything you've heard before.

Recorded live. And then overdubs.

Review:

Now what the hell is this.....

Kooba Tercu is an Experimental Stoner Rock Band with the emphasis being on Experimental. Their S/T debut album is one weird as hell album that will delight and frustrate many of you in equal measure. As the bio states – this sounds incredibly familiar but sounding something completely different as well.

The album has shades of glitch based electronic synths and ambient noises. Then the band throw in elements of Hard Rock/Stoner Rock to confuse you with. Truth be told I hated this album the first time I listened to it as I couldn't get away with the experimental nature of it all. Then I decided to give it a few more listens and I slowly started to come round to the crazy experimental Stoner Rock world that Kooba Tercu have created here.

The album is all over the place then why can't I stop listening to it. It's crazy as hell. The album doesn't know what it wants to be. Experimental Rock, Avant-Garde Rock or Stoner Rock. It is undeniably heavy and deserves credit for daring to be so fucked up and different to other bands. There are great riffs to be found amongst the craziness of it all especially on 3rd track - Batman - as it ventures into Torche style Sludge Rock that I didn't expect at all. Though the riffs suddenly stop and is replaced with 30 seconds of experimental ambient noise.

You may think I hate the album. I don't. I'm just trying to point out how bat-shit crazy the album is. One minute it's all crazy as hell experimental and the next minute, the band turn into Sludge/Stoner Rock Gods. Chika and Disembarkation are two songs to prove this theory. The rest of the album is just as weird and wonderful as the first half as Koobu Tercu don't care what you think about them. They're creating music on their own terms and that's what makes them such a great band to discover.

Their S/T debut album is insane, crazy, fucked up, intense and a total blast from start to finish. They maybe the craziest Stoner Rock band currently out there. And I mean that in the best possible way. Check this out if you want to hear something different and one that doesn't play by the rules.

It's available to buy on BandCamp Buy Now Download and Vinyl through Spinalonga Records/Body Blows Records.

Words by Steve Howe

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