Search - Knut :: Terraformer

So amazing, but a little unbalanced. A must own!!!

Mike Wright | San Jose, Ca | 11/11/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I am a huge fan of these guys!!! This relatively unknown band from Switzerland killed me with their "Challenger" record and i have been hooked since then. I couldnt wait to go get this the day it came out and love it, well most of it. The first full song "Wyriwys" is amazing!! The best song on the record, super heavy, sludgy rock similar to Cult of Luna or Isis' older material. The drums are huge, The guitars are massive and very downtuned, and the vocals roars are very dense and powerful. The next two songs are both shorter bursts of rocked out hardcore metal, offtime, noisy, and intense. These two other songs are the only other songs on this record that have vocals. This is why i give this record a 4 out of 5. It almost seems like the vocalist quit or they ran out of time during the recording or something. Songs such as "seattle" and "Fallujah" are both along the lines of the first 3 songs but with no vocals they seem like they are missing something. "Solar Flare" is the second best song on here and it builds with a slow plodding pace until it explodes with huge walls of guitars and noisy ambience. This song is very similar to Isis' newer Panopticon record. Super heavy but very beautiful and moving as well. The next couple songs seem to blend together and then the record ends with the very cool, very ambient "Fibonacci Unfolds". Terraformer seems to me like it should have been an ep with only the best songs on here but instead comes off as a pretty uneven listen. The best songs here as good or even better than the songs on Challenger but there are only 3-4 songs on here that really stand out from the rest."

Shows promise, but flawed

pray_for_mojo | a van down by the river | 01/22/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Metal bands that are willing to push the envelope into more progressive and ambient areas seem to be few and far between, so I was excited to check out the latest offering from Knut, a relatively unknown band on the fringe of the metal / noise / hardcore genre. After listening to the album for a while, I have somewhat mixed feelings on it. Is the album different and interesting? For sure. But does the album actually work? Read on.



Terraformer starts off well, building though a distortion filled intro into the hard hitting "Wyriwys." It's a heavy and intense, if somewhat predictable, metal song. The screamo-style vocals are decently done, but are also thankfully sparse across the album. The problem with Terraformer is that with the exception of the relatively well done "Solar Flare" and the few ending tracks, the rest of the album comes across as a blur of heavy, repetitive riffs, with ambient sections thrown in between. And I do mean thrown, because that is how the album comes across. It seems as if Knut wrote a bunch of individual songs then tried to arrange them into an ambient metal album. There are very few organic transitions between tracks and the overall effect is to make Terraformer seem a little random and awkward. Even the song titles seem random.



It seems as if Knut can't quite figure out what kind of music they want to make - ambient metal or just straight up hard hitting metal. Unfortunately for them, simply inserting ambient tracks alongside more conventional songs is not the same as creating an ambient metal album. All it does is leave Terraformer hanging out in a musical no-mans land. Interesting, yet disappointing to most."