Korperschw​ache — Evil Walks

There’s a few seconds of this album that serve to sum it up for me. At the end of the second track, “Ouroboros: First Lesson”, a looped voice says “for his soul” - but to my ears it sounds much more like “rissole, rissole, rissole”. (A rissole being, of course, a tasty treat I associate with 1980s cooking.) The point being, that “Evil Walks” appears to aim at sounding evil and diseased; but instead fails dismally and verges on ridiculousness. Its the work of one man and his drum machine - a combination with a history littered by failure: alas, Korperschwache add no joy to that past.

The album operates on the fringes of metal, showing it in all three basic elements of the sound: dirgy doom guitars, snarling “goblin” vocals and a drum machine set to “metal”. But the music created with these, whilst nodding to metal, often inhabits more drifting, less tangible territories. There’s a definite psychedelic influence to the tracks, coupled with a sense of space that - more often than not - merely results in emptiness. Several of the songs essentially have two note “riffs”; and rather than these creating a hypnotic drone like Loop (as alluded to in Crucial Blast’s website description), they just sound empty and repetitive in the worse way: I cannot remember a single riff from the album, nor a hook or melody. Whilst it should be clear by now, that it isn’t an album created out of evil metal riffing; the fact remains that the “chorus” of the first track, “There Is A Certain Smell Attractive To Wolves”, is somewhat laughable. All of the other parts of the track point towards a desired perception of darkness, negativity, pain, etc; yet the riff is somewhat jaunty, almost nursery-rhyme. “The Rearing Elephant”, after an introductory passage, has a section that reminds me of a Bethlehem track; but here it sounds frankly awful, and makes me imagine what The Residents might sound like if they attempted a metal album. None of these things help create any kind of evil, diseased or oppressive atmosphere. I am, of course, presuming that this atmosphere is being aimed at; it might not be Korperschwache’s intentions at all, but then I’m not sure where that leaves it. There’s certainly some sense of a “trash” aesthetic, but its not followed to any length; if anything, the album could benefit from this - “Evil Walks” has very little personality to my ears.

This lack of personality is very evident in the production, which is somewhat clean and flat. Whilst there is some clipping noticeable in the vocals and drums, I can’t help but feel that a lot more “dirt” in general would have helped. The drums are very clean and very weak, and also very loud in the mix. The Crucial Blast description also mentions “skittery industrial beats and weird dubbed-out snares and concussive Godflesh-esque rhythms”; but for most of the album, the drums are programmed to be leaden metal/rock beats - and putting the drums through a ping-pong delay for a few bars is stretching “weird dubbed-out snares” a bit. “Ouroboros: First Lesson” does indeed attempt Godflesh-esque beats, but also, alas, attempts Godflesh-esque riffage; the end result being the listener is simply reminded how masterful Godflesh are.

Its not, however, a wholly irredeemable work: after the “Residents” section in “The Rearing Elephant”, there’s a grinding passage of primal riffing; and “The City Of Lost Girls” gains from simple repetition and a lack of vocals. The vocals themselves are not to my taste; but then Black Metal, in particular, is full of vocalists who straddle the line between the sublime and the ridiculous. Curiously, the most enjoyable element of the album for me, is following the trails of the immense reverbs the vocals are subjected to. But thats not really the most glowing recommendation for an album…