Album review: Tortuga – Kings of Albany

I’m not sure if it was Tortuga‘s intent, but the cover of Kings Of Albany is like having your eyes raped by an art college student who has just discovered LSD and conspiracy theories. That searing hot pink – so easily and frequently deployed to point out the Fun! and Quirkyness! of twee retro indie-pop outfits – takes on a brutalist tone in the context of the flayed gentlemen and skull-headed spiders. This almost certainly isn’t the Ting Tings… and thank fuck for that.

Tortuga play doom metal, you see. And not the currently trendy hard rock stuff either; Kings of Albany is scrapingly heavy, mixed for brutality over melody and powered by surprisingly progressive percussion – there’s a definite chunk of post-hardcore in their heritage, too. The guitars chug and grind away at downtuned riffs, and Gareth Evans shrieks and wails like some extra from a Polanski battlefield scene. What the cover does for your eyes, the music does for your ears in a million shades of graphite.

Bright-pink happy, Tortuga are not. But then you knew that already, didn’t you, having checked the tracklisting and found titles like “The Lachrymose”, “Bury Me In You (Fatal)” and “Hell’s Red Roads”, placing Kings of Albany quite safely in the traditionally bleak and morbid territories of doom metal and the more nihilistic end of UK hardcore. Songs about meeting girls at the rock show are not on the agenda.

The hardcore brutalist aesthetic is somewhat ameliorated, though. Tortuga show an almost progressive approach, and not just at the level of individual songs. “Somethingness” is a dark eulogy that gives way to the bare-knuckle bludgeon, twisted guitars and howling choruses of “The Laudanum Boys Club”, which in turn ends in a film sample (for which I can’t find a credit) before returning full-circle to the funereal dirge of “Nothingness”.

But if you thought Kings of Albany was going to lull you into sleep (or, more likely, some sort of coma or anaphylactic shock) they pick things up again with the frantic intro of “Winter’s Widow”. The whole album shifts paces and textures carefully, never once leaving you stuck in a traffic jam of seven similar songs, and even managing to surprise with the maudlin piano ballad of “Something Blue”. And being an In At The Deep End release, it’s cheap as chips, and you know the bulk of the dosh will actually go to the band themselves. Result.

Of course, the caveat there is that, while Kings of Albany may be affordable, well-constructed and deceptively intelligent, it’s not the sort of thing that anyone other than a devoted fan of ludicrously heavy and miserable music would be likely to find themselves enjoying. Tortuga make no concessions to fashion or listenability; for them, it’s all about exorcising their existential malaise, pouring it out into a relentless torrent of muddy psychological run-off. It’s not pretty, and you’ll end up filthy, but there’s an impressive natural power waiting for those brave enough to step close. Just be careful the undertow doesn’t drown you.