Review Archive Series #8: The Flying Luttenbachers, Cataclysm cd

The following review represents one in a series of reviews published during my tenure as the resident music critic and assistant Arts Editor for The Phoenix, the official student newspaper of UBC-Okanagan in Kelowna, B.C. They are being reprinted here because I feel that while these reviews might represent a point of serious-suckitude in the developement of my writing, they are examples of my earliest attempts at criticism (if jerking off on an album's cover can be considered criticism), and above all: these albums desperately deserve the attention of your tinnitus-damaged ears.















The Flying Luttenbachers, Cataclysm
ugEXPLODE, 2006

Weasel Walter is on a mission to make modern music his prison bitch. Having penetrated the gaping-asshole blackness of godless infinity on 2004's The Void, Cataclysm finds the self-described 'free-chromaticist' and his partners in 21st century compositional crime, Mike Green, Ed Rodriguez, and the inimitable Mick Barr, celebrating "the inevitable self destruction of decadent, tyrannical, or non-sustainable systems." Wowza. Well...if there is one thing you can't accuse Weasel Walter of, it's not taking his music seriously enough. Case in point: on one of the albums stand-out tracks, the Luttenbachers cover the fourth movement of French composer Olivier Messiaen's "L'Ascension;" which accentuates the album's conceptual framework while attesting to Walter's affinity for twentieth-century avant-garde composition. The most recent addition to the Luttenbachers line-up, Mick Barr, makes his manic mark all over Cataclysm, delivering his best shredding since Orthrelm's obscene 2005 masterwork, OV. Showing no signs of slowing down, this iridescent behemoth of a band continues to hybridize itself and its sound; incorporating every conceivable genre from brutal progressive rock and no-wave skronk to technically absurd avant-jazz and beyond. Give Weasel Walter your money!