KARKARA – All Is Dust

vote
7.5

• Band:
  CARKARA
• Duration: 00:46:51
• Available from: 03/22/2024
• Label:

• Stolen Body Records

“Everything is Dust”, Karkara tell us in the title of their third album. Everything is dust and it is precisely to that of the desert that the music of these French guys, on the road since 2019 and well introduced in the large group of revitalizers of seventies hard rock, a current rich in numbers and in the variability of the proposals, directly refers.
The transalpines, whose name derives from a Tunisian term that can be translated as 'hooligan/slacker', place themselves in a visionary and dilated dimension of rock sounds, immersing themselves and drowning us in stoner forays with a marked oriental touch, to give us a transcendent experience detached from strictly earthly impulses.
A bit like they had already done in the previous chapters of their discography, but now going to extremes some concepts, Karkara mix harshness, hard rock tones and delirium to confuse, fog, make you detach your feet from reality and get lost in whirling and destructured plots. As if they started to play a 'regular' piece of music and then, almost without realizing it, they went straight to improvisations on improvisations, now pushing hard on some more bizarre idea, now convincing themselves to go straight and massive, so as not to get lost in clouds of sound that are too abstract.
Lovers of 'wah-wah' insistent to the point of absurdity, feverish in the concatenations of effected guitars and moaning of ardent and at the same time melancholic sounds, the three pepper the tracks with many small incisions, a programmatic deviation from the fulcrum of the operation and embroider velvety psychedelic spirals. The sound is truly 'desert', boundless, even if cyclically the group returns to show harshness, to become poisoned, reconnecting at will relatively more rude and less visionary.
But this is not the case with the opener “Monoliths”, an imaginary journey without a destination where you are pulled in multiple directions, and everything is kept vaguely on the right path by the heated drumming of the drums, while the effects contaminate the guitar sound to the point of distorting it and the synthesizers flow torrentially. Going forward, the instrumental set also becomes richer, as in “The Chase”, which presents some catchier traits – thanks also to a more frequent use of the voice – and willingly welcomes elegant saxophone lines into its arms.
The pounding and seemingly endless flow of music thins out the stylistic differences between the six episodes of the tracklist, which preferably deserve to be appreciated in a continuum that ties them all together, as is the will of its authors, given that each chapter seems to flow directly into the next.
The prevailing rhythm can then be more distorted and enigmatic (“On The Edge”), fairytale-like and dreamlike (“Moonshiner”), or fervently hard rock, dirty and moderately wild, as in the title-track, while that idea of ​​dizziness, hallucination, dispersion in a place without borders and points of reference, magical and isolated, never passes through the album. In short, for those who follow the psychedelic drifts of stoner/hard rock, love prolonged mental journeys, Karkara will be a welcome discovery.