Megrim is totally different from last year’s Places. Instead of a handful of tunes with assorted flavors, here you get a continuous work, made up of twenty cinematic pieces that ebb and flow like a proper soundtrack. While lacking the instant tune effect, Megrim is nonetheless a very intense record, full of drama that inherits those magnificent strings and epic surroundings from Places‘ most evocative moments.
Don’t think it’s all ambient and melancholy though, the trademark Kattoo / Beefcake eclectic style is still present, as you can hear in the head-nodding hip-hop track 6, the adrenalin-ridden rhythmical acceleration of track 8, the cut-up vocals and scrambled breaks of track 14 and in the tribal percussions of track 15. All this stuff packed with native Americans and Japanese talking, war battles, beautiful piano melodies, echoing whispers and oriental chants. There are indeed many ingredients in Megrim, homogeneously distributed along its fifty minutes, creating a record that, as is often said, is a perfect soundtrack for a movie not scored yet, but in this case I feel I can use this loose definition with confidence.
Megrim is out now on Hymen Records.
