Review: Prąd ‘Octotanker’

Prąd sticks their shooting star boogie from Wroclaw, Poland with a cold-wave musical laminate that combines Bauhaus kraut-core stacked with post-modern rock and melted with microwaved reverb love on this, their 2021 release called Oktotanker and an independent release at that.

The first track of almost eight minutes Bring Me The Head Of Nurse Hatchett is an opus that swings for the bleachers with a musical roller coaster that rides on rails of wavy gravy synth-guitar, and sparks with an ether fed dry lightning that does a balancing act on the It’s Heavy rock-o-meter between groovy and graven. Song two Oktotanker gives me the heeby jeebies – the starkness of Joy Division squeezed through The Verve vapors of delayed guitars is given a good shake then plated and forked by Marcin Galkowski’s smooth crooning baritone and a rhythmic mechanized meat beat.

Conan The Astronaut 2 manages to do a lot with a few sparse chords and a nothing teeter-totter guitar lick under vocalist Galkowski’s invocation of the Nick Cave and Peter Murphy spirit caravan. Righteous.On Nothing We Know Can Remain bass banger Tomasz Krymski likewise charges his bottom end into the breach and marks a Joy Division goal. Listen at the seven-minute mark and get your horns up-head bob on. This tune I doth proclaim my favourite song about existential angst by a rock band, all bloody nine and a half minutes of the Joy Division sonic love.

This is a band that does a lot with a little, managing to paint a vivid picture within uncomplicated song structures…

I Look Into The Sky brings the Deaf Radio-QOTSA smell along with Marcin’s homage to Josh Homme’s greasy sly-boots delivery perched on top of a rock ditty which slips into an interstellar Spirit in the Sky shuffle. Likewise on Lunar Sea we get another slice of the QOTSA du fromage. Smell the fort, smell the sky, hear the bell … Aokigahara drops and squeezes a waltz ballad clanger within a ponderous ten-minute rocker. Whew.

Lads and lasses, I got mad love for this Polish band. Prąd recorded their first EP in 2015 then followed up about every two years with newly released nuggets before they delivered on Oktotanker. This is a band that does a lot with a little, managing to paint a vivid picture within uncomplicated song structures, relying on studio majik and one of my favourite stringed instrument incantations, a guitar sermon of dotted eighth note delays; this and the rock throat of Marcin Galkowski.

I can see this material played live as a scorching mind meld of musical pushmi pullyu, surfing two waves at once – a cosmic tide of space vibe and euro-tribe rock. I enjoyed this release and I think you will too… and so it is my Brothers and Sisters.

Label: Independent
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram

Scribed by: Dani Bandolier