Gonkulator are infamous (at least among those who have even heard of the band) for being abysmally bad, but the strange thing is, almost no one I know has ever actually HEARD them - their reputation truly precedes them. Now, usually if anything gets bad feedback to the level this band has, I take it as a sign of quality - lets not forget how much of today's "cult" releases were panned as "horrible crap" in the not too distant past...so with that in mind, I had no reservations about picking this up when I found it in a local record shop. Did my "gamble" pay off ? Unbelievably so, as this is now one of the foulest sounding CDs I've ever had the pleasure of owning - it ranks right up there with early ( circa "The Oath Of Black Blood") Beherit. In fact, I'd say that if you took said Beherit album, stripped it of it's Blasphemy (Canada) influence, and replaced it with a heap of noise instead, you'd end up with "Satan's Burial Ground" - of course, you'd also have to throw in a bit of a Mortician influence (in the sense that like Mortician, a lot of the appeal of Gonkulator, besides it's unholy fucking racket, is their clever (and usually comical) use of dialog samples). Production (or lack there of) is from the "sludgey wall of indistinguishable noise" school of record production, and the "vocals" (it's really hard to even call them that) are particularly buried/fucked up beyond the point of recognition - go on, TRY to decipher a SINGLE word on this, I dare you. Occasionally a "riff" does manage to cut through (I think I heard one on track 7 somewhere), but for the most part, the bands self proclaimed label of "black noise" does them justice.

That pretty much sums up this abomination of a release - I give it an almighty "two horns up", but alas, I feel I might be one of the few who feel this way - I can understand why they've gotten such a bad reputation - their lack of music (which in turn leads to the assumed lack of ability), their silly name (isn't a "Gonkulator" slang from the TV show "Hogan's Heros" in reference to "a pile of junk" ?), and I won't even get into the band photos (they have to be seen to be believed), but crap or not by anyone else's standards, it has such an abnormally violent vibe (kind of like a retard on a murder spree) that it appeals to me...

© 1999 chorazaim