Stoner rock is fun. Drinking beer is fun. So a stoner band titling their new album with an adjective for the taste of their favorite beer kind of just makes perfect sense. Karakuchi is kind of a compound word that captures the essence of “spicy mouth,” and is the core of the slogan for Kaleidobolt’s band members’ favorite beer. Immediate, sharp, intense, and refreshing all apply and the band thought, “Hey! Just like our songs!” and that is how Kaleidobolt’s fifth album came into its name. It’s fun!
Helsinki’s Kaleidobolt hasn’t always been so karakuchi, having started out with a more maroyaka sound (smooth and mellow), though it’s relative, of course. Those first four albums party hard, for sure. They’re just way more content to drift away with the bonfire smoke for a few bars before snapping back to the dance. Stoner rock got rolled up with psychedelic rock almost immediately and then laced with a little bit more prog with each album along the way until Kaleidobolt had conjured something energetic, noodly, groovy, wild, tempered, weird and wonderful in This One Simple Trick in 2022.
Now four years later, Kaleidobolt slam their empty cans against their foreheads in unison to declare, “the time for fun is now!” Just look at that album cover. Just listen to the amped up power trio overture that kicks off album opener “Tinkerbell,” its beats, riffs, and rhythms. There’s Motörhead in there! What better way to launch a statement of rough and rowdy, riffin’ and spliffin’, raucous intent?
The eight songs that follow take the total to about 37 minutes of heavy psych-prog rock and roll that never stops rockin’, reelin’, and steamrollin’ with all the diesel-fueled cacophony of the raging automobeast on the album cover. The PR hype calls it all “hyperkinetic rock.” Indeed.
And, again, fun is the fuel so, even with the odd diversion into a deep, dank riff run, a psychedelic jam, a prog rock time and tempo shift, or even a spazzed out solo, Karakuchi always brings it back to smiles. The feel here is a spectrum of warm, from the brightness of sunshine in clear blue sky to the wafting heat of the fire under a sky full of stars, always with the bonding warmth of connection with friends.
Scandinavia has long been home to such amazing eclectic bands as Motorpsycho and Circle that start with a fairly straight-forward if unusual approach and then bend and twist and shape it into new and wonderful things over their careers. And, of course, Svart Records has always loved weird and eccentric bands. No surprise then that an album like Karakuchi features songs like “Friends Of Fire” with sections that recall acts as disparate as the aforementioned Motörhead, Foo Fighters, Thin Lizzy, and Norway’s Brimstone Solar Radiation Band. “A Chance Of A Lifetime” somehow channels Sweet and Black Sabbath via Valkyrie. Amazing. That they keep it all cohesive and fresh is testament to their commitment to tight execution as players and skills as songwriters.
Karakuchi definitely extends its arc over the latter half of its runtime, hewing much more closely to Motorpsycho than Motörhead, and that may be a sign of a band coming back to who they are or perhaps a sign of things to come, maybe both. Either way, this is an album that does exactly what it tells you it’s going to do from the get go, which is to have a blast. Things wind down a little toward the end the way every good party does, and even that feels like it’s just what the band was after. If Karakuchi has a weakness, it’s that it really feels like a party album and so its impact may be fleeting in the same way. Winding down seemingly just as it gets fired up. Then again, you don’t skip the party just because it’s going to end anyway. You get the fuck down while the gettin’s good and Kaleidobolt’s got the soundtrack for that.
