post rock / experimental / alternative
Toska is an album released in May 13, by experimental post rock project Fat Old Donald, from the Czech Republic. One hour long, the record has eight tracks: 1) Ibn Ezra; 2) Tünde; 3) Larva; 4) Toska; 5) Comme il Faut; 6) Lájos Bácsi; 7) Rybba; 8) Neumann; with an enormously introspective, frivolous and dense style, and exceedingly proverbial, lugubrious and somber vocals that reverberates through a clean, vast and expansive perspective a fragile and depressive, but lucid musical cosmogony, the general sound delivered by Fat Old Donald in this sinister framework is slow, diluted and afflictive, and sordidly anticipates the sentient expectation of a darkness that gradually drains all palpable resolutions of life.
With an interesting, meticulous and methodic style – that can be quite monotonous at times – nevertheless, Fat Old Donald really knows how to properly conceive an atmosphere of dense, restless and pragmatic uneasiness, whose frigid and melancholic guitar lines are gradually revealed to be the epicenter of an emotionally vague, pale and diffusive disturbance. With a sensible beauty that underlines the melancholy of its existential playfulness, the music found on Toska displays a formidable degree of sophistication and pungent audacity, though sometimes becomes redundant, opaque and lost in the endless repetition of a predictable formula.
Despite the fact that there is nothing too extraordinary about this album, Toska displays a virtuous conjuncture of qualities, and a decent degree of originality. The diluted darkness that comes out of the melodies – slowly trespassing a subtle level of beauty that gracefully indulges in the instinctive desperation dispersed by the harmonies – reveals a consistent degree of compositional skills, whose audacious, uncommon and hyperbolic creativity certainly provides to the muscular tissue of the sound a pervasively robust and cohesive musical density. Nevertheless, underneath this spectacular disposition of tormented artistic vitality, there is a sonorous and coherent anatomic contingence, restraining the monumental order of painfulness that integrates the inherent structure of its horizontal grandiosity.
Unfortunately, you will have to undermine your patience, in order to listen to this whole album at once; despite its deeply depressive atmosphere, though, Toska displays a uniquely proverbial and sincere radiance of detrimental, but veraciously artistic agony, on a very personal scale of lugubrious darkness. Definitely, an intriguing work that deserves to be properly felt, appreciated and analyzed, this strange and bizarre, but amazingly effective, fearless and original album proves all the way through to be one of a kind.
Wagner
With an interesting, meticulous and methodic style – that can be quite monotonous at times – nevertheless, Fat Old Donald really knows how to properly conceive an atmosphere of dense, restless and pragmatic uneasiness, whose frigid and melancholic guitar lines are gradually revealed to be the epicenter of an emotionally vague, pale and diffusive disturbance. With a sensible beauty that underlines the melancholy of its existential playfulness, the music found on Toska displays a formidable degree of sophistication and pungent audacity, though sometimes becomes redundant, opaque and lost in the endless repetition of a predictable formula.
Despite the fact that there is nothing too extraordinary about this album, Toska displays a virtuous conjuncture of qualities, and a decent degree of originality. The diluted darkness that comes out of the melodies – slowly trespassing a subtle level of beauty that gracefully indulges in the instinctive desperation dispersed by the harmonies – reveals a consistent degree of compositional skills, whose audacious, uncommon and hyperbolic creativity certainly provides to the muscular tissue of the sound a pervasively robust and cohesive musical density. Nevertheless, underneath this spectacular disposition of tormented artistic vitality, there is a sonorous and coherent anatomic contingence, restraining the monumental order of painfulness that integrates the inherent structure of its horizontal grandiosity.
Unfortunately, you will have to undermine your patience, in order to listen to this whole album at once; despite its deeply depressive atmosphere, though, Toska displays a uniquely proverbial and sincere radiance of detrimental, but veraciously artistic agony, on a very personal scale of lugubrious darkness. Definitely, an intriguing work that deserves to be properly felt, appreciated and analyzed, this strange and bizarre, but amazingly effective, fearless and original album proves all the way through to be one of a kind.
Wagner
