![News Added Sep 17, 2016 And for more proof that refusing to give a solitary fuck about genre restrictions is ultimately for the best, consider Oslo’s Okkultokrati. After three well-received albums of snotty, obnoxious punk with more than a passing nod to Norway’s black metal heritage, they’ve thrown us one big, purple, velvety curveball in […]](https://hasitleaked.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Okkultokrati-Raspberry-Dawn-320x320.jpg "Okkultokrati : Raspberry Dawn")
And for more proof that refusing to give a solitary fuck about genre restrictions is ultimately for the best, consider Oslo’s Okkultokrati. After three well-received albums of snotty, obnoxious punk with more than a passing nod to Norway’s black metal heritage, they’ve thrown us one big, purple, velvety curveball in Raspberry Dawn, a bizarre record that seems to take an anarchic, child-like glee in tearing apart the band’s punk origins to reveal the industrial and goth seams beneath, and then shredding those too before haphazardly re-stitching the whole thing in the shape of a big, wonky middle finger.
It’s a bold move, and could have gone horribly wrong, but a lot of the record’s charm comes from its ability to find beauty in disparate and even cloying sounds that feel like they really shouldn’t work together. Take a song like ‘We Love You’, for example: the drums sound strangely processed and mechanical, like Godflesh’s drum machine stuck on the D-beat setting, the guitar tone is jangly, washed out and in danger of being swallowed whole by the queasy 80s goth keyboards, the bass is thunderous but buried beneath layers of static hiss, the vocals are raw, scratchy, possibly very drunk and abrasively high in the mix a la Nocturno Culto on Panzerfaust, and yet it all comes together in a very organic (albeit grotesque) fashion. From ‘Suspension’, a sleazy, low-key electronically driven track that sounds like Cosey Fanni Tutti and Andrew Eldritch duetting whilst competing to see who can fit the most Quaaludes in their mouth at the same time, to the raging digital hardcore of ‘Hidden Future' with ominous droning guitars and Vangelis-on-a-shit-Casio-at-3AM-after-a-bottle-of-Aldi’s-most-agreebly-priced-red-wine keys, Raspberry Dawn carries such a manic energy and flamboyant disregard for what’s expected of it that it is arguably both the most interesting and defiantly punk rock statement the band has made thus far.
