Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a definite challenge, May 2, 2003
i got a killer deal on this 2002 LP by knut, a hardcore/noisecore/chaos band from switzerland.
rumor has it there are tons of similar bands popping up in switzerland every day, but let me tell you, accept no substitutes. knut are the real deal. they have blurred the dividing lines of what we think extreme music should be, so this deserves at least one spin from everyone who is reading this.
some of the most engaging, complex hardcore riffing of 2002. also one of my top 5 albums of 2002. they have progressed with the hardcore idea much like converge did in 2001 with 'jane doe', and much like botch did in early 1999 with 'we are the romans'. in my opinion, these 3 albums will be extremely important to the future of noisecore. very experimental, while at the same time extremely solid. just my cup of tea. every track is strong here, with #6 being the pinnacle. its simply the most brutal track of 2002, period.
for fans of converge, coalesce, and botch, challenger would be a very wise investment. highly recommended.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
one of the best metal-hardcore albums, May 5, 2008
Knut is a band from Switzerland. They are in the same musical family as Botch, Converge, Coalesce ... But they have a sound of their own. Their music is colder, less emotional than, say, Converge (yet on this album they match the intensity of Jane Doe). Their style is characterized by precision and control in a way which is not that far, in spirit, from Meshuggah (by the way, Obzen is awesome !). In summary, if you like one of the previously cited bands, Knut is for you. Switzerland has some other excellent metal bands that are worth listening to (for example Nostromo: now defunct, they used to play some very impressive technical grindcore a few years ago).
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An experiment in chaos and monomania, July 19, 2004
The more traditional math-core songs on this album are devestating-- incredibly heavy, with complex riffs and some strange chords a la Voivod. If they stuck to these kinds of songs, these guys would be unstoppable, maybe the best hardcore band in the world. But a large portion of the album is devoted to highly repetitive, plodding songs that don't seem to have much of a point. Whereas their math-core songs are schizophrenic, moving from one disparate element to the next without ever really settling on anything, these slower songs operate like the mind of a psychotic, endlessly obsessing over one thing. They are pretty daring in their single-mindedness, I guess, but I can't say I understand what they're trying to achieve. The last track is one of the most repetitive I have heard-- it's about 13 minutes long (not counting the hidden track at the end, which may or may not be a continuation of the same song), and progresses through a total of 5 or 6 riffs, one after the other, many of which are played for 3 or 4 minutes at a stretch. I think this song would have been more effective if it had been about half, or even a third, as long. And I would not call the sixth track a song-- it's simply a riff, played over and over. The end result is that I view this album as an EP, since I love half of it, and find the other half excrutiatingly dull.
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by Knut 
