Review: Dragons Of Zynth - Coronation Thieves
Posted on 3 March 2008 | No Comments
I’ll lay it all on the line here and just tell you flat-out that Coronation Thieves is a powerful, chaotic, and (ultimately) brilliant album that seemed to fly under just about everyone’s radar last year (including mine). This debut from the Brooklyn-based noisemakers Dragons Of Zynth is the musical equivalent of a kid in a candy store who grabs a little bit of everything as they pillage the little shop. It’s Prince vs. Black Dice vs. Husker Du, Hendrix vs. The Eternals, or even De La Soul vs. Gang Of Four. It is all that and more; It is incredible and overwhelming.
An obvious comparison to casual listeners would be TV On The Radio at their most disjointed and then some, partly due to TV’s own David Sitek’s production work on Coronation Thieves. The end result is neo-avant-disco-punk-soul that rips and tears at your speakers until they are just about disintegrated. A discernible streak of noisy free-jazz also runs through the music of Coronation Thieves as well; in large part (probably) because Aku and Akwetey O.T. (the twin brothers that front the band) both studied with jazz saxophonist Yusef Lateef.
But as visceral and incendiary as the album is, Dragons Of Zynth manage to somehow keep the melodies afloat amid the cacophony of raw angular guitars, walls of fuzzy distortion, and excessive new wavey synths. Everything on Coronation Thieves isn’t necessarily like a caged beast unleashed. The album’s closer “Closer” is a bit more subdued and works amazingly well as the final exclamation point at the end of a thrilling, exhausting, but truly excellent album.
MP3 | Dragons Of Zynth – Who Rize Above Coronation Thieves
MP3 | Dragons Of Zynth – Breaker Coronation Thieves
Filed Under: Album Reviews, New Wave, Noise, Post Rock
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