The first album by Taman Shud may come as something of a surprise. If you’ve seen pictures of three fairly regular looking guys and a similarly ‘normal’ (whatever that means) girl, you may not be prepared to have your brain turned inside out by the wall of sound suddenly confronting you. The arcane, majestic, roaring music they produce is truly mind expanding. These are wolves in sheep’s clothing, dedicated to bringing the unseen forces of magik and the occult to your conscious mind. Not for the faint hearted, the tracks on Viper Smoke may be a real shock to the senses, but they exhibit real quality. The music is ear-bleedingly loud, the vocals a tortuous scream or a sonorously intoned cloak for the underlying music, barely covering the heavy, embellished guitar or frantic keyboards.
Tracks like ‘Book of Lies’, ‘Crime Cycle’ and The Hex Inverted’ were already firm favourites, having been previously released on a joint EP with the Fat White Family or on the recent Trashmouth compilation ‘Thinking of Moving to Hastings’, but the rest of the album lives up to the promise of these early releases. The music sometimes has a dream-like quality, with vocals which sometimes feel as if they stretch off into the distance, like chanting emanating from a dark priest calling the faithful to action. Hypnotic at times, on rare occasions dirge-like, but always enthralling, the album transports you to an other-world of cloaked figures and barely lit gothic caverns.
I had already been drawn into the unusual, if sometimes tongue-in-cheek, ethos of the band. I can sympathise with their complete boredom with the ordinary grind of modern life, where there is no belief beyond the physical. The album as a whole is a beautiful, brutal masterpiece designed to remove you from the everyday. I think it does exactly what it means to do.
RIFFED's Rating: 9/10
Listen to 'Viper Smoke' via Youtube: