Autokrator – Autokrator – Review

Music, a world full of unique and creative artists trying to create new and innovative art, some groundbreaking and some influenced. But rarely do we come across bands, even in the weird world of heavy metal bands, that only dependent absolute heaviness to try to make sense of the music. Welcome to the world of French death metal band Autokrator as they release their self titled full length this year.

Loic. F, the main man behind this new project from France formed Autokrator in 2014, after a series of black metal projects and this is quite innovative and new. But sadly that’s where the positives end. While technically the band is labelled as death / drone / industrial metal, its hard to decipher and understand what Loic and other guest musicians here are trying to achieve.

There is just too much distortion and atmospheric noise. Even the nasty growling vocals are made to sound like the band is playing in a very large empty room. The album lyrically follows a historical concept that Nero was fiddling while Rome was burning and its aftermaths. Frankly the band does a great job at putting that across, but the music simply nullifies the story telling. The album totally surprises at every step, like with ‘Act 4: Autokrator’ which is musically just an Italian political speech with a granular tempo, building an atmospheric sound in the background.

The album is hard to digest even as a metalhead who listens to diverse sub genres of the music. Its full of heavy atmospheric sounds almost giving a feeling of huge chunks of concrete slabs falling off the sky right on your head, and frankly it only manages to leave a bad taste in the mouth. The music is criminally repeatitive all throughout the album with the band managing to bring in musical influences from sludge, drone, industrial and death Metal, all mixed in indigestible proportions.

This album might click for hardcore fans of drone and industrial Metal, but I highly doubt anybody else would really even care to give a listen to the full album once. Its almost as if the listener is forced to put in as much effort as possible and undergo the same pain as the musicians, mentally and physically. Frankly I find that hard to digest in every sense.

Rating: 25%

Autokrator by Autokrator