I love it when I come across music that seems to create its own genre just to have a place to exist in or, better still, do away with such outmoded concepts altogether and just gets on with being itself. Sevaskar’s Skar City is just such music.
Anything which seems forged of metal riffs and industrial soundscapes and yet seems to come across, through clever layering and production, as a sort of noisy-ambient, cinematic soundtrack (if such a thing isn’t too oxymoronic) is a skilled creation indeed.
Tracks such as Run sound like distant artillery fire and has the feel of an incoming maelstrom, spiralling riffs punctuate by staccato sound-beats, Follow feels like hardcore alternative dance as its liquid grooves perform a sonic shamanic ritual to an unseen electric god and Skarred takes a slow-burning, dystopian boogie through Vangelisian landscapes.
And then there are tracks such as Discover which are built only of atmosphere and anticipation, restraint and delicacy, opposing tones and textures compromising into a gorgeous dance of power and poignancy. And through these stark and darkly dreamlike musical paintings runs all manner of spoken word inclusions which add to the tension even more.
Skar City is like no album I have heard before. The soundtrack to a dystopian sci-fi movie yet to be written? Music from the harder end of the scale seeking an ambient and dance-infused outlet? Futuristic Avant Gardening? The real sound of the post-genre world? To be honest it is anything you want it to be and such labels are only relevant to lazy journalists (like me.)
For the rest, it is just great music, adventurous, forward-thinking, deftly crafted, seeming to borrow what it needs from any sound, style or scene past and present or more likely blind to such demarcations in the first place. One day all music will be driven by such attitudes.
