Album review: Djevera – The Rising Tide (Part 1): Corsa Al Ribasso

Back in 2004, North London hardcore/alternative metal outfit Djevara released their first album entitled God is White. In 2007, they released their second album Third World War : Cast The First Stone. You might well have noticed a pattern emerging here, and be expecting me to say that 2010 sees the release of their third album – and while that may well be true by the end of the year, the reality on the ground is far more nuanced and complex.

Y’see… Djevara have decided to release their new album The Rising Tide in two separate parts, Corsa Al Ribasso being the first. This explains the typographically involved album title that makes the record sound like a fantasy novel. The press release informs me that the first half of The Rising Tide is much more emotionally complex and challenging than the second half. “Challenging” is one way of describing it. “An Utter Waste of Time and Energy” is another.

At a nuts and bolts level, Djevara are a late-90s Rage Against The Machine rip-off. Think of rumbling guitar lines distorted into a swampy mess; think of randomly inserted bits of noodly musical landscaping; think of vocals that meander between whispering and shouting; think of a band like One Minute Silence minus the funk, or Tura Satana minus the tits playing in a West Country pub car park filled with empty cider cans and bored teenagers.

It is not that Djevara are incompetent musicians, it’s that their sound as captured here is uninspired, derivative and profoundly ill-conceived.

The derivative nature of Corso Al Ribasso is obvious from the opening tracks “Jesus vs Mohammed (Ali)“ and “Lines in the Sand“, but it really becomes evident once the band start trying to be clever by ‘augmenting’ their basic sound with the kinds of experimental flourishes and quirky tricks that you find in the works of much more interesting and talented artists like Shellac, At The Drive-In and Clutch. For example, title track “Corsa Al Ribasso“ is a non-sequitur acoustic number with hilarious Native American-style chanting and attempts at close-part harmonies; then we have the Mr. Bungle-style atonality and Shellac-style syncopation inserted into tracks like “Once More With Feeling (Best Supporting Actor)” and “View From A Glass House“. In and of themselves, these little flourishes are fine. Djevara are competent musicians (albeit poorly produced ones) and they are more than capable of borrowing the ideas of other bands. The problem is that Djevara deploy the techniques in a way that suggest a complete failure to understand what made them so powerful in the first place.

Indeed, once you start using these kinds of tricks to distance your sound from traditional verse-chorus structures and simple melodies, it becomes vitally important to be aware of issues such as tone and atmosphere. Insert weird flourishes into your music without these them serving some wider thematic purpose, and what you have is a jarring, grinding mess. By and large, Djevara’s attempts at experimentation produce just such a mess, but the final track, “Rising Tide of the Disconnected“, comes closest to getting it right as its series of sonic vignettes acquire a quite tightly focused jam-session feel that makes it the record’s stand-out tune. It is also the best song on the album because it is the one that features the least vocals.

Oh lord, the vocals.

There’s a line in Garth Ennis’ comic Preacher when a local sheriff admits that he finds a teenager’s fondness for Nirvana to be completely unfathomable because, according to him, it sounds like a “Down’s Syndrome fella set to music”. This turns out to be a fairly accurate description of the vocals on Corsa Al Ribasso. We’re talking drunks-at-the-bus-stop bad here, folks… I can forgive a lack of diction that makes the lyrics incomprehensible, and I can even forgive their being systematically off-key, but I cannot and will not forgive them their complete inability to inject even a modicum of emotion into their vocal performances. Corsa al Ribasso is supposed to be the result of a change in artistic direction prompted by the suicide of someone close. but the vocals are entirely lacking in anything approaching feeling – which is maybe just as well, considering the aggressive and haunting levels of insipidity on display in the band’s lyrics.

Djevara’s The Rising Tide (Part 1) : Corsa Al Ribasso is an absolute calamity of an album, a portrait of journeyman competence betrayed by uncomprehending ambition and pretension. It is ugly, stupid and pointless.