Album review: Zarboth – [self-titled]

Who the hell releases this stuff?! Surely no-one thinks Zarboth is even a break-even proposition for a record company? No wonder it took two independents to put out their self-titled album… if their whole output is like this it’s a wonder they’re not already bankrupt! More to the point, who would listen to this for pleasure? For interest? Or even curiosity? Or even masochism?!

Zarboth are a French duo who play drums and a 7-string baritone guitar through a bass amp. For the first few seconds of “Addict” I thought they were a bass-heavy early Stones tribute band. After that they explode all notions of commerciality and proceed to twist rhythms, flood speakers, stab the guitar and crash around like anxious punks with attention-deficit disorder. Imagine 12 or 13 songs collided into a single four minute chunk of sound; there’s the beginning to Zarboth‘s insane nightmare of noise.

There’s no point listing individual songs as they are all, essentially, the same song broken into shards of sound with quiet/loud bits, slow/fast bits and obscure time signatures thrust into discordant melodies. Eight tracks (well, I can hardly describe them as “songs”, surely?) in 30 minutes might as well be 80.

I don’t know why our continental cousins seem to be so enamoured of jazz but this is the logical extreme. Years ago there was a large – and peculiarly French/German – musical movement called free-jazz. It lead to the rather more Krautrock sensibilities of Lard Free, Can, Psy Free, Organisation (pre-Kraftwerk) and Kluster being lumped under the banner of “free-rock”. Now Zarboth appear to have created a new genre of free-punk or free-metal. Experimental in the extreme and avant-garde in execution, this speeding juggernaut of spiky noise splinters and crashes at every opportunity. It even comes with singing and words… though not necessarily at the same time.

The only other bands Zarboth even remotely resemble are Cardiacs (who are presumably being given electric shocks every three to four seconds to increase the jerky and epileptic rhythms exposed here), a punked-up Henry Cow (a progressive outfit from the seventies who were almost the forerunners of Pronk), a severely staccato Mr. Bungle (without the melodies, breadth of vision or sheer strangeness that always marked them out) and the almost-metal mad nonsense of Primus (who also use bass as their lead instrument).

Zarboth realise your worst fears of what King Crimson or Napalm Death could sound like, in your own head. Be afraid, be unbelievably afraid. Uniqueness is all well and good, but that doesn’t excuse this cacophony of noise rock. Zarboth make Godflesh sound like Kylie…