2023-06-10 20:18:00
Avant-garde dissonant jazz death metal in progressive space futurism: Imperial Triunphant switch (apparently to start a series of covers?) in the assimilation mode and become attached to the Radiohead-stroke of genius Paranoid Android a.
Zachary Ezrin on the motivation behind getting the song from Ok Computer to assume:”We’re big fans of Radiohead and their ethos. We feel that Radiohead have a diverse and unique approach to songcraft and lyrics that we’ve always been drawn to, and the song ‘Paranoid Android’ provides a perfect canvas for us to play with and to create. […] It was our pleasure to reinterpret this great rock classic and we hope you enjoy it.“
In fact, this version of the number leaves an ambivalent impression (even if one fundamentally appreciates both bands – the interpreting one and, above all, the authoring one).
Imperial Triumphant beyond the golden 20s and Metropolis weave their way along the original melody, whimpering and wheezing deliriously with surging psychedelic space guitars, usual intricate polyrhythms and a decidedly distinctive grumbling bass, dragging the vocals in rasping slow motion to the groove, flattening the course of the structures and later they also briefly dissolve it in a synthetic lye in order to allow themselves a short avant-garde jazz respite – only to work their way into an all the more diffuse fever dream and to blast the epically pleading, suffering hymn into concrete. The schizoid intoxication of the subtly astral textures surrounding the “Great High“-Passage sparkles in all colors tacking- Imperial Triumphant only measure themselves against themselves, deliver a great finale despite the too abrupt end.
Still, it’s a pity that their version of Paranoid Android largely acts like a relatively uniformly clogged stream, which is more like a condensed Moloch, and the individual segments are not sufficiently differentiated and accentuated, and only insufficiently contrasted – even the most intense moments of opulence and catharsis choke out in a felt standardized bulge, the amplitudes of the outbursts (“Ambition makes you look pretty ugly“) are not ideally contoured in the otherwise great, organic production. Whereby Radiohead a stormy roller coaster ride of emotions takes place, behind the meticulous, technical attention to detail there is a lack of emotional bandwidth; and the best scenes are always those in which the original comes closest melodically associative.
Which of course is whining at a high level – even if it were nothing else, the New Yorkers absolutely adopt the original, at least from the first second (deliberately weird and disorientingly dangling along the composition in a very free-spirited manner), which is what with such an iconic template is already quite an achievement.
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