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Listen to Bokassa’s satirical new single, Let’s Storm The Capitol
Bokassa have unleashed a new single and video, and it’s a “satirical look at how rarely people form their own opinions even though they might think they do”.
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Album review: Bokassa – All Out Of Dreams
Norwegian riff-lords Bokassa headbang towards a hopeless future on riotous fourth album All Out Of Dreams…
- Words:
- Sam Law
Initially, there’s a hint of hopelessness about Bokassa’s fantastic fourth album. Its bleak artwork shows a felled ice-giant, with red light pouring from a cracked cranium. Song titles like The Ending Starts Today and Everyone Fails In The End ooze with wry fatalism. Most of all, its title – All Out Of Dreams – feels painfully loaded coming from an outfit who seemed like they had the world at their feet when Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich named them his ‘new favourite band’ in 2018 and invited them on a massive tour the following year, but whose momentum was brutally derailed by COVID.
There’s no self-pity here, though. Just massive riffs, dystopian dark humour and a desire to tear it up like there’s (literally) no tomorrow. Garden Of Heathen, for instance – featuring Sick Of It All legend Lou Koller – marries roadworn pessimism and gut-punch heaviosity to a fists-aloft punk-rock singalong for the ages. The ridiculously-titled, deliciously fuzzy Straight Edgelord sounds like its been marinated in beer and smoked in weed. The title-track, meanwhile, is joyously contrarian expanding up from an oddball midi riff into a chest-thumping anthem to the end of the world.
There’s also a brilliantly unwavering commitment to blunt force. Aaron Beam of Red Fang crops up to lend his heft to the bizarro bludgeon of Bradford Death Squad, while Let’s Storm The Capitol comes on with a head-spinning, almost Andrew W.K.-ish hook of, ‘Guess I’m dying tonight!’
Late highlight Gung Ho delivers the absurd swagger of ’90s Metallica, before Crush (All Heretics) brings down the curtain in a storm of massive atmospherics and political purpose: its crooned vocals, doomy guitars, and news-report samples a reminder that the apocalypse is a very real possibility in the current socio-political landscape.
Until it arrives, however, count on Bokassa to keep serving up absolute the bangers.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: Mutoid Man, Kvelertak, Red Fang
All Out Of Dreams is out on February 16 via Indie Recordings
