Karg – Marodeur

vote
7.0

• Band:
  Karg
• Duration: 00:54:45
• Available from: 04/18/2025
• Label:

• Art of Propaganda

Streaming not yet available

If Michael Kogler's best-known project, aka JJ's metal, is that of the Harakiri for the Sky, for over ten years one of the most authoritative and admired exponents of the post-Black Metal movement, its most prolific and long-lived creature is another. Let's talk about the Karg, started almost twenty years ago and with this “Marodeur” at the finish of the ninth album, also in this case, as for its best known band, in close collaboration with the Art of Propaganda record company.
The history of the Karg is that of a One-Man Band, until 2018: from that year Kogler perceives the need for line-up enlargement and emerges the desire to play live. The question is also handled with regard to the stylistic area, with the first works with the most bristly and underground feeling, with large ambient contaminations, while today you tell us about a kaleidoscope of moods, sensations, images and, of course, sounds often kind, introspective, with cadences and arrangements only partially similar to the black metal and its post-prefix.
The Harakiri for the Sky remain in any case a good starting point to give a first orient reference, on the other hand, the Austrian musician ends up going to go to preferably on poignant, roughly melancholic, fragally angry, inconstant and wearing love for the Shoegaze. The main difference is that the Harakiri for the Sky have a more univocal direction, they offer less for experiments and big variations from one song to another – covers excluded, of course – and give greater momentum and 'belly' involvement to their compositions.
The music of the Karg, however hermetically or too intellectual, nor is it difficult to access, has more elusive characteristics and propensity to bring external influences inside. It is heard, in our opinion, that the group still today, however nominally a quintet, is linked to the desires of the leader to have many different things convey within it, trying to harmonize them in a unitary speech, even without losing in eclecticism.
Three years after the appreciated “resignation” – in the middle, the EP “Trauerjahre” of 2024 – there are no arias of revolutions in “Marodeur”, nevertheless the Austrian formation knows how to extract another tracklist from the many meanings, far from being a 'US -so -called' product or a mere collection of solutions already exposed to nausea. If you think that the fascinating cover in cuttlefish shades is a simple clever to capture attention you could also be right, but it can be seen that this idea is in line with the type of production, oriented towards the Lo-Fi even without exaggerating.
The general atmosphere is soberly sad, the Black Metal Striat of Shoegaze, post-rock and alternative rock does not move on coordinates so far from those of the best-known group of Kogler-also for a way of singing identical to that of the Harakiri for the Sky-but the sound contours are less clear and the cadences not so arrogant as in a “Aokigahara” or the recent ” Earth “. Riffing is on average quite docile, there is a languid and sweetly nostalgic feeling to make its way, as in the composite opener “Schnee ist das blut der geister”; Here the insertion of prolonged piano rugs does a lot to give color and thickness to the song, one of the best of the collection.
Despite its connotations, at least at the start, coming from extreme metal, music often becomes kind, calm, a kind of screen -span viusted with black metal, dotted frequently by airy melodies. Kogler's desperate hallway thus contrasting with a sound imprint nient' tried against rough or transciant.
As and more than in the Harakiri for the Sky, the songs take the turn of a overflowing flow of consciousness of the singer, with the effect sometimes to pull it a little for long, to tell the truth. To put a embankment of this sensation, it think of contour elements, as a second more calm item in “Yūgen”, or the violin incursions of the guest Klara Bachmair (Firtan, Visna).
The most typically post-Black Metal ridges sound slightly predictable and not so memorable, on the contrary the guitar dialogues to create blue harmonies, dreamy and serene shades, manage to avoid both falling on clichés and excessive repetitiveness. Although with a few moments of prolixity, “Marodeur” finally proves to be a good addition to the Karg catalog and more generally to the large discography signed by the tireless Kloger. His creative peaks are probably elsewhere, but this work is also gladly listened to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-aokbmg8s0