Hello and welcome back to the Bandcamp Buried Treasure article series, where I'll be hunting down Buy It Now/Free Download-payment option albums on Bandcamp by the best bands you've never heard! The goal is to introduce you smaller bands or obscure side-projects you might not have heard of. Anything to expand your musical horizons by just a little bit each week, all while keeping your cost (potentially) down! This week we'll be listening to the ridiculous instrumental technicalities that is Rook!
Usually I'm opposed to jagged-sounding guitars laden with distortion overtop some bass and programmed drums, but Rook has apparently mastered how to make it not only sound refreshing, but even a little bit innovative. The best way I can describe the Unfinity EP to you is that someone got a hold of old-school video game sounds (mostly old Sonic games) dismantled them, and rearranged them on various instruments with heaping mounds of heavy piled on top. The riffs are drawn out on the EP, but not for the sake of drilling them into your head. Rather, for the sake of evolving them over and over into a multitude of nightmarish demons that consistently shape-shift before your eyes… and that's the beauty of it! Rook can write music that acts as a soundtrack to your imagination, which means music written well enough to evoke images and thoughts. Talent, thy name is Rook.
It's easy to dismiss Unfinity as a Meshuggah ripoff with the first seconds of "Prelude; All That Is," because it starts off pretty Meshuggah-ey… but then! A different drum groove! Followed by a fade and what sounds like staring into an abyss. That's "Is," and it's a pretty roomy song that really does feel like entering a new dimension. The builds in the song don't explode, but morph into variations of themselves while still keeping that same darkness and reprising "Prelude, All That Is," because recurring themes are the jams. Then we've got "Everything Is Mostly Nothing, Pt. 1," which really does sound like Cloudkicker went insane with the metronome and tried to write some video game music. If that melody doesn't get stuck in your head instantly and even make you bob your head a little bit, then I've got some bad news for you; you're deaf. So that goes on for a little while in all it's badassery, only to be followed up by the similar, yet slightly different and logical followup to the song, "Everything Is Mostly Nothing, Pt. 2." Since hey, if you're gonna make a second part, make it flow. "Interlude; All That Will Be," serves its purpose to get you from the groovy depths of the "Everything Is Mostly Nothing" and make sure you're still breathing/mentally sound, because being in a horrible, dark, soulless, cold void of audio for a little while does that. Then "Will Be" comes… and while it has it's own things going on, it's a lot of reprisal, which is the perfect way to end the EP.
Yes; Unfinity repeats itself quite a bit, and it works so well it's crazy. Just think about how many times you hear the opening riff and what the feeling evoked is. It's almost an entrance theme, a welcoming of sorts and a little bit of a warning that there's no turning back, while songs like "Is" and "Will Be" bring back that monsterous, all-consuming emptiness riff, as if to say "you're in this now. You're part of this void." The riffs swirl around you, crushingly and conviction that the only option to maim but not kill; strike fear into the heart of the listener. Unfinity is a journey into the abyss and back- what you imagine the details to be is entirely up to you, but let your imagination run wild. This isn't instrumental music to put on in the background. This is a soundtrack to your imagination, and a great one at that.
