Kontact – Full Contact Review

[Cover artwork by The Alien]

PORTRAIT OF A KONTACT – FULL CONTACT SUPERFAN

I’m not about to say you can’t enjoy a record like Full Contact if you aren’t a fried lizard person who regularly cruises around in their underwear, but being one would likely work to your advantage because there are undertones of buzzed lizard people tattooed up and down this album. Lizard people and Kontact (innnnteresting…) prefer heavy metal raw, primitive, cold-blooded and with jussssst enough speed to test the limits before hurtling off the rails and into a pile of innocent bystanders. Wild ’n’ loose. Uninhibited. Level best lizardness, baby. Hell, principal Kontact architect / blower bassist / vocalist ‘The Alien’ (innnnteresting…) even sounds a bit like the villain reptile in some beloved animated film—nasally and bitingly howling through lyrics to give songs like “Doppelgänger” a clear and present Snake / Voivod underpinning.

CANADIAN lizard people at that! Which of course means there are Molson muscles afoot, and you can expect a level of inherent niceness to offset all the raw cold-bloodedness. So, yeah, a record like Full Contact is raw, gravelly and LOUD, but the fluid melody packed into the leads (courtesy of the Hrom side of the equation: guitarists Morh Morf Xela and Matt B1257 + 12 Z) helps keep things at least a little civil. “Hey, buddy, think about fucking off a bit when you get a chance, eh,” said the fried lizardman from Canada in his underwear after a neighbor asked him to turn down the noise.

Does Canadian metal care more about classic Judas Priest compared to scenes from most anywhere else? They wouldn’t turn their noses up at vintage Iron Maiden, of course—particularly the punkier Di’Anno face—but Judas Priest circa 1982 is of the biggliest importance to the current and continuously broiling traditional metal scene up in Canada, and you can expect that here as well. The fully peculiar “Heavy Leather” is the clearest case of this, launching with a distinct nod to “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’” before an unmistakable King Diamond laugh around 2:30 reverses things toward a patent wave to Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath,” from the album Black Sabbath. The song is oddly sleazy and punky, too, which conjures images of the Riverbottom Nightmare Band ripping through it in some derelict warehouse where rats in ratty Ratt shirts rail Ritalin as howls of “SHE’S INTO HEAVY LEATHA” rip through their teeny brainpans.

While Kontact ain’t exactly afraid to wear their influences on their sleeve, the clever ways they fuse everything together gives the end product a notably unique footprint. So, just when you think the record is primarily devoted to the ever-shifting face of Voivod, you get something as cold and unrelenting as “Ixaxar” that ends up conjuring images of a forgotten B-side to Khold’s classic Masterpiss of Pain. Or “Watcher at the Edge of Time,” which craaaawls like some sort of inconceivable Sunset Strip funeral doom song before spotlighting one of the record’s finest and longest solos. “Bloodchild” follows the crawl, and by comparison it hits like the breeziest summer hit one could hope to encounter. That friendly melody will weld itself to your synapses, offering up “the album’s sole message of hope,” by the band’s own admission.

Gather yon homeskillets; get out to an abandoned field in the middle of the night; spark up a fire; crank up an old boombox; power through a couple cases of Schlitz; have yourself a close encounter with an alien flyer; offer their tractor beam nothing but cassette copies of Rrröööaaarrr, Angel Rat, Screaming for Vengeance and the first Ratt EP, plus a $2 VHS version of Slapshot; wait for the arrival of Kontact (possibly hidden in human form) to deliver Full Contact as a result of your labors at some point in the future; love it like a reptile.