Car Bomb visionary technical guitarist and sound effects mad scientist Greg Kubacki launches pulverising instrumental mathcore project Sun Guts with debut album Kilonova.
Greg Kubacki has been a busy man as of late, between last summer’s release of Car Bomb‘s Tile Whisper Dreams EP, a welcome return after a quieter period since the band’s last album Mordial in 2019, taking over Joe Duplantier’s guitar duties during Gojira‘s winter tour of France due to injury and most recently, writing and putting out music as a solo project while Car Bomb works away on fine-tuning material for a future album. It’s pretty safe to assume the majority of Sun Guts listeners will be seasoned Car Bomb fans, eager to hear what else their favourite laser-gun guitarist has in his arsenal of delirious, gravity-defying riffs, and let’s just say, they won’t be too disorientated.
Indeed, Kubacki’s aim with Sun Guts isn’t to distance himself stylistically from Car Bomb in his writing and radically flip the table by going country or otherwise (seriously, why are most solo projects country?) but rather to release music as he writes it instead of having to go through the longer, trickier process of coordinating with three other band members, especially when it comes to music as surgically precise and technical as Car Bomb‘s before being able to put it out in the world. This newfound freedom also allows Kubacki to explore some of his influences beyond the mathcore/tech metal realm. Something he immediately made clear with the project’s lead eponymous single and its ignorantly heavy breakdown inspired by contemporary brutal death metal acts such as Sanguisugabogg, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, delving more into the dissonant, shoegazy guitar texturing heavily influenced by bands like Deftones or HUM with the added bassy heft of Torche for example.
Of course, these moments of stylistical departure from the frenetic, mind-boggling technicality that is to be expected exist as brief pockets or bubbles within the ever-morphing fever dream sound Kubacki conjures up where abrupt pitch shifts and metric modulations are king.
‘La Grande’ for instance is perhaps the biggest nod to the influence Meshuggah has had over Kubacki’s work with an unmistakable, slippery groove propulsed by tones so beefy they could result in concussions while ‘Sphyxia’ and ‘Perpetuals’ are reminiscent of Car Bomb‘s Meta and Mordial respectively.
‘Pyro Prosthetics’ puts the emphasis on playing around with dissonance, including a riff that sounds like Chat Pile being played on a banged up cassette tape and ‘Motorbolt’ is the closest we get to a more “standard” groove and death metal inspired track after it has gone through the math metal blender, with a fair share of slowing down before speeding up again sections, bleeping harmonics and warped, screeching pick scrapes. While short ambient interludes can sometimes come across as cheap or unnecessary in an album’s flow, ‘Through an Ocean of Keys’ and ‘Silverdrone’ provide brief, welcome palate cleansers in order to keep indulging in the unfolding sonic chaos at maximum capacity and avoiding potential fatigue.
Following the anything but sloppy ‘Slop Tactics’ and its robotic sounding drilling glitches, Kilonova gently drifts to a close with ‘Exit Space’, a softer, condensed example of what the album sets out to do; that being striking a balance between unsettling dissonance, entrancing groove, adventurous and even at times alien technicality and yet somehow, possessing a soothing nature in the way it all flows together.
Having all three promotional singles be the first three tracks of the album is a rather nice touch since it better preserves the feeling of anticipation and discovery once that threshold of familiarity has been crossed; a practice that could potentially benefit future releases in general by lessening the “spoiler” effect the singles roll-out may have over the album experience upon first listen. Of course, this ultimately boils down to personal preference and individual approach to consuming music.
While Kilonova treads upon familiar ground, it does however present some new, fresh ideas within that same realm and expands on certain stylistical aspects in a way that would not be possible or wouldn’t necessarily translate as well within the context of Car Bomb.
Perhaps in turn, Sun Guts will become the gateway for new curious listeners to Car Bomb and other bands of the same ilk that juggle both crushing heaviness and outlandish mathematical technicality, but for the time being, this first release is a welcome addition to this specific niche of heavy music and should delight anyone who favors a bit of madness and malleability in their progressive instrumental music.
Avrian O'Brien