Decimated Days – The Drunk Monks (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

You can wax lyrical all you want with the journalistic pen but sometimes a good analogy is worth its weight in gold, or at least worth its weight in column inches. Imagine a car containing all that is great about rock music barreling west on an open highway, the driver half-drunk at the wheel. Heading east at an ungodly speed is a similar car stacked with all that is cool about electronic music, that one driven by a stoned dance-floor disciple. The collision is inevitable. And what comes crawling out of the wreckage is Decimated Days. 

Where the rock swagger meets the clubland groove, the grit of the street merges with the neon lights of the nightclub’s chill-out room, where synth sensations dance to a stoner-rock beat, that is where you find the suitably titled Drunk Monks conjuring their hybrid music. Electro-rock seems such a loaded term but that is essentially what this is, though it wanders a slower sonic spiral and walks a more considered musical path.

It’s like a punch in the face from a silk glove, it feels great but it leaves you reeling although that might give the impression that there is some quick hit gimmick or sonic trick at work here, there isn’t; Decimated Days builds its weight through deft sonic layering, the weaving of synth textures one upon the other but everything is hung on a swaggering, and slightly stoned, rock structure. Perhaps I’m not so good with analogy after all.

Anyway, my journalistic failings aside, Decimated is a great track, one which simultaneously sits in rock and clubland camps and will probably annoy the hell out of both communities. I get the feeling that for The Drunk Monks that is sort of the point anyway. You’ll either love it or hate it but which side of that divide you sit on says a lot more about your own sonic prejudices than The Drunk Monks’ musical choices.