Review by Andy Valentine
Raunchy is a band that doesn’t have a fucking thing to lose.
And because of that, they have nothing to be afraid of. With nothing to lose as a band, you have the freedom to take risks, to be ballsy – to make shitcrazy creative decisions no other band would ever dream of making.
Take, for example, the opening track to A Discord Electric, called “Dim the Lights and Run.” It difficult to even call this track a song, in the operative sense of the term. It has rhythm sure, melody. But I hesitate to call it a “song.” What it is, is a five-minute journey into an ethereal wonderland woven together through delicate synth scratchbeats and punctuated chugga chugga coupled against Jeppe Christensen’s hauntingly angelic crooning. And make no mistake, Christensen is as much a crooner as the best of them. Just think Mike Patton crossed with Tony Bennet crossed with Frank fucking Sinatra. This guy would be as appropriate singing at a Vegas lounge as he is in a Scandinavian metal act. Shit, you could probably fuck to “Dim the Lights and run” just as well as you could any of the best Portishead tracks.
And then there’s Kasper Thomsen, who can effortlessly switch between black-metal, groove-metal, and death-metal vocal styles without missing a beat. Seriously, tracks like “The Great Depression” have Kasper switching between three different metal vocal styles within the time frame of a single verse/chorus/verse transition. It’s fucking astounding.
So then you’re five tracks into A Discord Electric, trying to make sense of it. Trying to wrap your head around the nearly countless layers of genre bending wickedness, and then, all of a sudden, What the Fuck!? Is that a harmonica!? The answer is yes. Yes it fucking is. Fucking “Blueprints for Lost Sounds” starts with a perfectly harmonized line exchange between a folk harmonica and a big riff guitar lick. And it works. It challenges you not to like it, and then laughs at you when you realize how much you dig it. It’s infectious.
That same theme permeates much of A Discord Electric. It’s begging for you to hate it. It wants to piss you off. It wants you to be offended by its blatant and shameless disregard for genre convention. To wit, much ado has been made of Track 8, “Big Truth,” a *gasp* pop song hidden on the far end of this record’s 1-hour playtime. You just got your fucking ass crushed by Track 7 “Tiger Crown” (my personal favorite track on this record), and then, holy fucking shit, “Big Truth” launches into a new wave pop melody straight out of something like Duran Duran. And not in an ironic way. But inside the context of A Discord Electric, it works. And it not just works, it’s downright masterful.
That’s what’s so interesting here. Each layer of this album is so beautifully bathed in artistic contradiction, you could spend months digging through it all. The album is at the same time pop-friendly, but in no way is it radio-accessible. It’s like the whole album is a big joke, yet it’s poignant enough to bring a tear to your eye (see “Nght Prty” and “Tiger Crown”). It is elegant and catchy, but also deeply nuanced and heavy like a wrecking ball. At the same time both rewarding and punishing. It’s designed to surprise and offend you metal sensibilities, but nearly demands multiple listens. I haven’t stopped listening to it since I got it four days ago.
We, as listeners, spend hundreds of dollars every year buying CDs, going to shows, looking for something different. Not the same old bullshit we hear from every new band that sounds exactly like some other band you just heard the year before. With A Discord Electric, Raunchy represents the end of all that shit. It pokes you in the eye and challenges you to like it. It kicks you in the nuts and tells you to appreciate it because no other album ever did that before.
And goddamn is it catchy as hell. Try not to get “Tiger Crown” stuck in you head. I dare you. I fucking double dog dare you. And not just that one. Each and every one of these tracks digs itself into that dark corner of your brain reserved exclusively for sing-along infectiousness. Raunchy owns that fucking real estate.
And then there’s the fact that this album is absurdly self-aware. On the opening track Jeppe Chistensen croons “we’re sending out a signal/it's a cause for celebration/this is our new music.” Essentially issuing a challenge to the listener, saying, “the album you are about to hear is unlike anything you’ve ever heard from Raunchy – crack open a beer and let’s party.” The band overtly tears down the musical fourth wall, saying later (on “Big Truth”) “we are what we are/and if we change/you should know we did it for ourselves.” This is the album itself acknowledging that the listener exists and is real, turning to speak directly to that listener, and saying “fuck it, we’re gonna play what we wanna play – you’re welcome to come along for the ride.” This willful recognition of standard theatrical boundaries, followed by the fuck-it-all destruction of those boundaries pretty much says it all about A Discord Electric.
You ain’t heard nothing like this before. And like they say on Track 10, “this kind of devil music is the Yeah Thing/we’ll be here no matter what my friend/we’re everything you’ll ever need.”
Fucken Aye right.
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Raunchy is:
Kasper “Kuffert” Thomsen – Lead vocals
Jeppe “Husmand” Christensen – Keyboards / backing vocals
Morten Toft “Molle” Hansen – Drums
Jesper “Mr. Burns” Tilsted – Guitar
Jesper Kvist – Bass
Lars “Many Beers” Christensen – Guitar