Kapitan Korsakov: stuff & such
Damn it, not again! Not again!!! You see, you look at the poorly Shooped (that means Photoshopped) cover, and you immediately write it off. “Wow, nice, someone got the free download version of CS or something, that’s nice, next!“, you say to yourself, and come back to it as you get to the bottom of the backlog stack you’re going through to make sure every band gets their damn due, since we have a problem with that around here. We don’t cater to anyone, no, forget that, we don’t be caterin’ to no one. Whatever comes, we go through it, this one, well, we just decided to put it to the side for a bit, because a fish hand, or hand fish, perhaps fand if you will, just didn’t look all the promising. Kapitan Korsakov can chide us for that later, if they like. stuff & such proves itself with very little effort. Buncha weirdos, these guys, but the kind of weirdos where you think “yes, I would so like to be friends with them, I would”. Smashing things, rolling around on the ground, diving wherever they may, these guys in many way capture the essence of the underground. The “screw it all we’re doing this for us” mentality that sometimes creates the best out of the bunch. stuff & such is a huge mix of many different things, so many even tossing out a single genre to tag it would be fruitless, but sadly we had to place something under ‘Tags’ into the site code, so please excuse all of them. Kapitan Korsakov come from Belgium, and they practically redefine twenty genre tags in a single go, though sometimes to the confusion of the listener.
stuff & such has almost too much going on to even start anywhere, and the intro pretty much sets you up for it. Big reason for that is there’s so much variety in it, you can’t peg these guys from one song to the next, not really at all. Practically every track is another surprise, and you’re never really sure where they’re going to go next when you listen to it for the first time. Even on subsequent listens you still wonder what they’re doing with it all. But, that’s meant in a good way, for the most part. Kapitan Korsakov, has a great, sludgy sound to them when they catch the good groove; the bass is spectacularly audible and grimy for many of the tracks. The guitars experiment in a number of stellar ways, often doing their own thing while the bass goes off and does its own thing, but together in a tightly-knit combo pack. The vocals, well they go from light to screams to corrupted via effects, there’s a lot they had to choose from here, apparently, and they used all of it. Even electronics, even random objects most likely, they went kitchen sink with this, but somehow it all makes sense, most of the time.
stuff & such is a ton of fun most of the time, but sometimes Kapitan Korsakov may have gone a bit too far on one side or the the other for their own good. So far it sounds like an entirely different band finished parts of the album. Listeners who like their stuff heavier will likely find the softer tracks, which sometimes sound like you’ve suddenly fallen through the floor of a brutal sludge attack into an idyllic barn where a bunch of old folks are listening to Bobbejaan Schoepen, who we have nicely linked there for you so a big “huh” doesn’t fill your face. In fact, the few songs like this on the album would be easily categorized as “stuff Deaf Sparrow never even reviews”. Once, maybe twice, we’d ignore it, but there’s a bit more of ‘the light’ on here that takes away from the more devastating and corrupted sound of Kapitan Korsakov, where honestly they sound a hell of a lot better anyway. It’s more to their benefit, in our opinion, to stick to that route and do as much with it as possible, because at times the lightness sounds like a perfect time to get up, go get a drink, grab a bite to eat, and come back when they play real music. Still, these moments are easily, and thankfully overshadowed by the rest of it. Some of the tracks plain ole’ kill it.
Kapitan Korsakov Official Facebook
Written by Stanley Stepanic
Kapitan Korsakov: stuff & such
KKK Records
4 / 5
