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Kaplana:
Hors de Combat
Good bands these days don't have anything to do with genres. I dont know if its the hipster were so different tendency or just an evolution-through-natural-selection in the marketplace of ideas, but it seems like one of the highest compliments that you can pay an album is to call it genre defying. Well, I dont but it for a minute. The way I see it, working within a genre, combining several, or rejecting them altogether is a means to an end. Genre-wise, no approach is valuable for its own sake; each is a path to creating sounds that are interesting or moving or just plain catchy as hell. Its the interesting-ness, the moving-ness, the just plain catchy as hell-ness that grounds the musical value. This insidious genre-defying-as-intrinsically-valuable ideal has even been taken to the extreme. If an album evades all description with words, why then surely youve got something special! Fortunately for this reviewwhich was written using wordsKalpana arent at all indescribable, but they are kind of, well, genre-defying. To describe then, weve got post-rock combined with indie-rock (whatever that is) and some heavier stuff thrown in too. Musically, that means dreamy, spaced-out guitars; loud/soft dynamics; repetition; build-up; occasional noisy jams; and sparse, distant vocals with lots of reverb. If Mogwai toured with Cave-In, then I guess Kalpana might open. Hors de Combat doesnt knock my friggin socks off, Mr. Bigglesworth. The song Amber, at over twelve minutes, is too long and mundane. If my friend Carlos were to pay the song a left-handed compliment, he would say: that redundant background noise, devoid of pleasing music, is somewhat dynamic! Carlos is like that though. Always with the left-handed compliments. Truth be told, it would be wrong to say that Hors de Combat doesnt have its pay-offs here and there. On, Save Me. You Cant Save Me, the repetitive, almost futuristic melody builds up to some gratifying rock action. Youve got an interesting melody that sounds like a music box playing the soundtrack to a 1930s sci-fi pulp novel (think of a musically prodigious but creepy-looking 8-year-old kid wearing a space helmet and jamming variations of the X-Files theme song on a Xylophone), and that definitely got my attention. I only wish Kalpana could have pulled this kind of card out way more often.
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