A mere eighteen months after their superbly psychotic debut, Wandering Through Concrete Valleys, Omnikoloss have returned, with a suitably dystopian interlude. It follows on where its predecessor left off, and it takes the form of a single track, of the sort of length that would put your average doom band to shame: just shy of twenty-seven minutes. This is コンクリートの谷を彷徨って II , which is quite literally a very complicated way to say Wandering Through Concrete Valleys II, and it’s… a lot. Much like Valleys I, Valleys II has a great deal to say and is doggedly determined to say all of it, without pausing for anything as mundane as a breath.
Even before getting into the musical aspects of this, the sheer density and intensity of this make it an interesting proposition. Some albums provide escapism by way of beauty, atmosphere, evoking all manner of emotions and memories and so on and so forth. They provide a world for the mind to wander in. Other albums on the other hand, achieve it by beating and crowding every single other thought out of the listener’s head, and becoming all-consuming. Omnikoloss inhabit the latter space like some sort of experimental industrial techno Gollum: happy to be left to their own devices under the mountain for long periods, but they will happen to you if you venture into their cave.
Moving beyond initial impressions into the music itself, there’s so much going on here that the overall effect is somewhere between an aural collage of lots of different things arranged artistically together, and a film soundtrack. The latter of those is partly because the lyrical content here owes a significant debt to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Omnikoloss are, perhaps a touch obviously, the subterranean workers in this scenario) and any number of other works of dystopian fiction. The former is thanks to the many and varied moving parts that make up the Omnikoloss experience. Valleys I was a whirling carnival of industrial, techno, synths, and enough black metal that latter stage Kovenant were by far the most obvious comparison point.
Valleys II leans more into the industrial and synth end of things and takes them right into the experimental and borderline avant garde realm, conjuring the sort of exotically filthy, wretched hive found in Blade Runner and countless others, but with more immediate cataclysm and the end of all things. There’s a Japanese thread running through the whole thing, as suggested by the title, and almost a dark circus vibe to some passages. The jazzy tinges (which sounded not unlike the weirder end of The Prodigy last time round) should be both unexpected and out of place, but if you were paying attention to Valleys I they’re not particularly unexpected, and somehow they’re not especially out of place either. There are few – if any – direct comparisons to draw to this on a musical level, and the ones that do spring to mind tend to also have that overtly weird, sprawling, multi-genre aspect to them, such as Laibach or Hatari.
The overall vibe is that the end is nigh for the grim dystopia we were introduced to in Valleys I, and a crazed prophet of some description (think the madder end of A Forest of Stars, or Königreichssaal) has arrived to tell you about it at great length. Which will be a hard sell to some, but for those who enjoy listening to the passionate declamations of madmen (and madwomen), there’s plenty of room in the scene for another one. That said, it is less immediately accessible than Valleys I, and there’s no breathtaking, punishingly fierce adrenalin rushes like ‘Just One Fix’, but as a grim, apocalyptic coda to their debut, it works superbly.