Featuring members from various Polish rock bands, Sonic Wasteland comprises four musicians who pool their considerable talents to create a sound that can only be described as “dark urban folk”. Disconcerting and discombobulating, their debut album Tales From The Wasteland contains a dozen tracks that offer a frightening glimpse of a not-to-distant dystopian future. Shining a light into the black, Sonic Wasteland have created a truly original album that ensures the dark has never sounded so bright.
Sonic Wasteland welcome the listener into their strange world via the hypnotic rhythm that characterises opening track ‘Cosmic Wasteland’. It’s strange, otherworldly and arrives like an alien craft shining light in every direction with the circular drum beat acting like a totem around which the song rotates. It’s very trace forming and places the listener into another state of mind and that means that when a stark, sonic shift occurs at the one-minute mark, it hits with some force. It’s akin to a bullet appearing between your eyes (one that you don’t see until it makes contact) and that renders it all the more impactful. However, when listening to Tales From The Wasteland you quickly learn to expect the unexpected and it’s the constant curveballs which the band throw (they come from all directions; left, right and centre) that makes for such an engaging experience; this isn’t the type of album you put on as background music, rather it demands your full attention. With each of the twelve songs having their own identity, Tales From The Wasteland is an album stitched together by its own eclecticism and rarely stays in the same place for long.
For this record the band drew upon a love of dystopian media, and that means this album has an oppressive aesthetic hanging over it, an impending doom and a sense of paranoia that only comes from living under the watchful eye of a surveillance state. Imagine Nineteen-Eighty Four and Alphaville set to music and you’d have something approaching the beauty of Tales From The Wasteland. Vocalist Kuba Panow has a vampiric quality (kind of like Jim Morrison on mescaline) which adds an air of authority to proceedings (as if he is indeed “Big Brother”), yet it would be unfair to single out any one band member as they display an obvious chemistry and turn ‘Soulburner’ into a high-octane blast of devilishly good darkwave.
With only two of the twelve songs breaking the three minute barrier, Sonic Wasteland don’t hang around and don’t use two notes when one will suffice. While they can’t be characterised as punk, there’s a kind of reductionist philosophy going on which finds the band’s sound condensed into a red hot laser beam. Again, they can’t be pigeonholed as “prog”, yet there’s a progressive nature (in its purest definition) to tracks such as ‘Daddy’s Outlaw’ and ‘Out Of Time’ which suggests that they could veer off in any direction. A patchwork quilt of sounds and influences, Tales From The Wasteland is a multilayered, multifaceted affair and one that’ll reward repeat plays as subtle nuances buried in the mix reveal themselves on successive spins.
Like the very best dystopian fiction, final track ‘Long Gone Cats’ poses more questions than it answers but it proves Sonic Wasteland to be fertile soil
Track List:
- Cosmic Wasteland
- Talisman
- Sleepless Nights
- Electric Pain
- Monsters
- Daddy’s Outlaw
- Sin Of Ancestors
- Out Of Time
- Soulburner
- Withwork
- Last Train To Endsville
- Long Gone Cats
