Review of Morkobot - Morbo

Reviewers tend to get caught up in clever descriptions, mostly because it’s sometimes hard to describe exceedingly typical things. You can’t say, for example, “It sounds like average goregrind” for every average goregrind album you review. That would either be incredibly lazy or the most honest thing a reviewer has ever done, I’m not quite sure which. Really, if you expect your audience to be familiar with goregrind conventions then it may not be necessary to describe the vocals as sounding like “a pig shitting down a drain pipe”. We all know what goregrind vocals sound like.

Far worse, of course, is describing something atypical. So much time is spent coming up with creative ways to describe average music that you’re at a loss when you come to something original or just something fucking weird. Just writing “It’s fucking weird” would be either incredibly lazy or… well… incredibly lazy. I mean, you spent time coming up with creative descriptions for something that may be easily relatable through references (“It sounds like Cock and Ball Torture”), you can’t cop out when something actually requires a decent description to convey a sound or song. What’s my point? Morbo sounds like a couple of robots trying to fuck a satellite dish.

This is some strange shit. Perhaps their closest counterparts would be something like Lightning Bolt or White Mice but only in a kindasorta way. Where some of their contemporaries focus on off the rails fury and chaos, this Italian three-piece (two bassists, one drummer) eschews improvisation for meticulous composition. The basses collude and diverge around tightly wound drumming, weaving together noise, doom, sludge, and punk while culling an impressive array of sounds from their instruments.

This is densely layered mathnoiserockfuckifiknow. There’s no need to describe the individual songs, it all kind of sounds like some aliens crashed on earth and the only means they have to contact their home world is via a couple of basses and a set of drums. It’s very mechanical and very tight. There are plenty of bleeps and bloops, skreeps and skronks to go around. The playing is technical without being masturbatory. The focus is on skilled compression and efficient manipulation of the instruments. It’s experimental music that embraces the music, instruments and all, and is a welcome reprieve from the nihilist tendencies of a lot of experimental and noise musicians to abandon form.

Elaborate descriptions aside, if you can get into stuff like White Mice or just have an affinity fucked up instrumental music, give Morkobot a listen. It’s hard to recommend because it’s the kind of stuff that will drive a lot of people straight up a wall because, honestly, it sounds like Dysrhythmia contracted the disease from Tetsuo: The Iron Man.