Review by Jason Guest
Taking a bunch of styles, sticking them in a blender, hitting the high speed setting, and then devouring the lot, from Milan, Italy, Destrage are a delightfully strange and unpredictable beast. Punk, funk, metal, thrash, electronica, hardcore, mathcore, acoustic gentleness, catchy choruses, and anything else you can think of are gleefully slammed, splattered, and smashed to pieces in a bunch of tracks that simultaneously defy categorisation and mesmerize with their audacious charm. Guitar lines are traded, riffs are blasted, strings are scratched and sniffed, drums are decimated and dandled (yes, dandled), time signatures are stretched, torn, twisted while many a groove is dug deep and the rules are ripped to bits, chewed and chomped and pejoratively puked up.
As an introduction to the album – and the band if you’ve not heard them before – ‘Destroy Create Transform Sublimate’ could serve no better purpose, the title itself telling you all you need to know. Nothing is sacred, everything is malleable, and all is valid. Throughout the album, genres are plundered, techniques are toyed with, styles are subjugated, and an unendingly curious cavalcade of songs laced with catchy choruses and glued together with boundless energy and an unremitting sense of fun flow ever onward. With a bunch of musicians that are all insanely adept at their craft and as energetic as a kid with ADHD on amphetamines, the album hops, skips, and leaps from mighty buildings to the tiniest of hovels and then blasts back into space without once losing momentum, direction, or coherence.
Where many bands have tried and many have fallen foul of the occasional masturbatory boast, Destrage have managed to stitch together a Frankenstein’s monster of an album that is furious, frantic, eclectic, elastic, eccentric, and incredibly entertaining. Dynamic, discordant, and delicately disturbing, Are You Kidding Me? No. will have you bouncing off the walls. And no, I’m not kidding.
8.5 out of 10
Ed: Read Jason’s interview with vocalist Paulo here
Track listing:
- Destroy Create Transform Sublimate
- Purania
- My Green Neighbour
- Hosts, Rifles & Coke
- G.O.D.
- Where The Things Have No Colour
- Waterpark Bachelorette
- Before, After And All Around
- – (Obedience)
- Are You Kidding Me? No.
