Kólga, Black Tides, United States, self-released, CD / vinyl LP (2024)
One look at that wacky album cover and I was hooked: I just had to find out what this Texan five-piece band Kólga was up to on its debut full-lengther “Black Tides”. The band counts as its members various musicians from a range of Texas-based rock and metal acts including Cleric (death metal), Dead to a Dying World (blackened sludge / doom metal), Sabbath Assembly (psychedelic rock / doom metal) and the wonderfully named Tyrannosorceress (black metal) so its music is bound to feature some elements from all of these genres. And lo and behold, on hearing “Black Tides”, I was flung back into the darker end of 1960s surf rock / psychedelia spiced with Lovecraftian-lite horror from the briny deeps. Yes folks, Kólga brings us a lively and whimsical (if sometimes creepy) interpretation of blackened surf rock that treats the arrival of Cthulhu and his horde of intergalactic monsters on Earth as an excuse for a pool party where humans and aliens alike can go on bad acid surfing trips and count themselves unlucky (or lucky, depending on whose point of view) if they don’t meet the Big Green Octopus-Face Boss himself for dinner.
With titles like “Space Beach Massacre”, “Squall of Cthulhu” and “Endless Bummer”, the various songs can be expected to parody black metal, the Cthulhu Mythos, B-grade sci-fi / horror flicks from the mid-20th century and other pop culture phenomena from the same period. To some extent this is true of most songs, though as the album continues the black metal aspect tends to drop out quickly and all that remain are the raspy inhuman singing (though there’s not much of that on what is mostly an instrumental recording) and a dark, almost black atmosphere hovering over the music. If you don’t care too much about being purist and insisting on an equal balance of black metal and psych surf music, you’ll find “Black Tides” an enjoyable if perhaps rough and ragged ride through kitsch pop culture and a mash-up of black metal, doom metal, Gothic horror, TV theme music and odd field recordings and sound samples of popping bubbles and watery, gluggy spoken monologues.
Nearly all songs on the album are outstanding in their own way: “Squall of Cthulhu” is the blackest and doomiest of the lot AND also features some of the most spirited surf rock riffing on the record; “Tethys” though bats that song out of sight with a grand symphonic epic style that goes through various key changes and turns into a wild psychedelic rocker culminating in a majestic doomy exit; and a trio of songs from “Riptide” through “Endless Bummer” to “Is This Real?” rips through beloved old 1960s TV theme music pieces like “Hawaii Five-0” and “Batman” in their melodies, rhythms and atmosphere. On this trilogy the organ gets a thorough workout along with trilling tremolo guitar riffs and chords that are ever so slightly dark and ominous though never truly menacing, and the result is music that just manages successfully to walk the tightrope between kitschy and gimmicky, and the dark abyss beckoning on the other side.
If there’s a criticism to be made, it could be that the Kólga guys are spreading themselves rather thinly over quite a lot of musical territory within the blackened surf rock genre and as a result, they fail to take full advantage of what that territory offers. “Is This Real?” dips its toes in crazed spaghetti-western film atmosphere but doesn’t go much further than that, and similar can be said of “Squall of Cthulhu” and “The Kraken” in their respective takes on black metal / surf rock fusion. Still, the fact that the Kólga musicians have a shot at exploring different facets of their chosen hybrid style, even if that makes for a rather uneven album, indicates that the potential for that style to develop and expand is vast, and the musicians are at an early stage experimenting with the music and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Future albums from these guys are likely to be more focused, more confident and maybe even more adventurous and eccentric.