Instrumental rock! Is your heart thumping yet? How about a mostly instrumental space rock band named after crazed German actor Klaus Kinski, who once reinterpreted the Gospels as a one-man stage show featuring Jesus as a psychopath? The fuzz hits heavy with the endearingly-titled guitar wail of "Crybaby Blowout," but "Passwords & Alcohol" introduces vocals and a more prototypical reference point in SONIC YOUTH's "Daydream Nation". Two other tracks feature rather subdued vocals, but for the most part this is an effects-laden instrumental quest in search of the noise sublime. Appropriate buzz-words may include: texture, dynamics, psychedelia, Sabbath-on-Demerol. You may notice an organ or flute or two, but the focus is on guitars taken to places that shimmer but don't shimmy.

There's a scene in the Klaus Kinski film "Fitzcarraldo" in which a bevy of Peruvian natives are employed to carry a steamship over a mountain. Why? Because Irish rubber baron Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald wants to build an opera house in the middle of the jungle. It's that sort of near-incomprehensible pathos which KINSKI-the-band seek to tap. For moving the ship over the mountain--no special effects were used--director Werner Herzog called himself "Conquistador of the Useless." Whether the murky depths of "Down Below It's Chaos" are viewed in similar terms depends on one's taste for the aural equivalent of said task. It's a dense, perilous and not immediately gratifying journey, but opera houses in the jungle don't come cheap.

- Shragge

OFFICIAL SITE: www.kinski.net

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