Korn‘s Jonathan Davis was so excited by ORGY that he created his own record label …
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Extreme Psychedelia
Delivered through the synapses of Russian-born, now Aussie studio owner Mike Trubetskov, The Overcoming Project is a work of disparate styles forming a novel whole; psychedelia, noise music, and of course, heavy metal.
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As he reveals in our interview, the starting point for the project was a cult 80s-90s Russian post-punk group called Civil Defence (Grazhdanskaya Oborona). If you listen to them long enough, it might scramble your insides. Which is a good thing; what GO does through weirdness, metal does through sheer brutality. With Mike Heller of Fear Factory behind the kit, you know you’re about to get a right royal pummeling.
Rubber hits the road as soon as you press play, Jon Howard (Threat Signal) shrieks bloody murder as guitars grind away like coiled up machines giving off sparks. The BPM in the hundreds already, Heller cranks it up a notch and gives his knees a dose of carpal tunnel in the process.
If Vanilla Fudge was all about slowing down the Beatles and smoking the reefer, The Overcoming Project is the opposite; punch the turbo and experience life on afterburners. This one is gonna melt faces.
A refrain lets us all breathe a little; melodic and easily chanted among a crowd it punctuates every line giving it maximum impact. As the band takes themselves off the boil, the psychedelia comes out to play. Leads swirl around thickly laid bass patterns, all conspiring to lull us into a trance-like state. Before long Jon and the band ramp up their campaign of destruction, mirroring the first two sections that came before. Slipping into half-time, we’re also drifting off into surrealism; images of waves, cicadas, and benches streak across our ears all culminating in a punch-to-the-gut ending: “and you are brought to rot!” Jon’s parting blow.
The music is tightly bound and impenetrably heavy; an overloading of the senses as is the case with psychedelia. If Vanilla Fudge was all about slowing down the Beatles and smoking the reefer, The Overcoming Project is the opposite; punch the turbo and experience life on afterburners. This one is gonna melt faces.
STICK THIS NEXT TO: Meshuggah, Killswitch Engage, Archspire
