Wonder

VINYL FORMAT. There is simply too much music in the world these days, and little of it seems to embody what could be described as passion or even soul. Rarer still are the bands who have stuck around long enough to be considered consistent institutions of musical integrity and ingenuity. All but extinct are the bands that embody/possess the qualities above, and who have continued to produce, evolve and thrive despite deficient attention from the music buying public. While artists like Melvins, Neurosis, Converge and Enslaved have managed to plumb the depths of the various caverns of heavy metal/hardcore/loud rock and emerged atop mountains of accolades (while simultaneously making careers of their craft), Knut have long labored in relative obscurity, churning out some of the finest all-enveloping-mathsludge-metal-pummelry known this (or that) side of the Atlantic. Despite gaining a steady fan base and extensive media coverage over the almost two-decade adventure of their career - as well as making it to the Swiss edition of Trivial Pursuit - Geneva-based quartet Knut is still occasionally filed away in the popular metalcore drawer. On their fourth full-length, the band sets the record straight. Three years in the making and again culled from myriad jam sessions, Wonder has turned out a monolithic album falling somewhere between explosive hardcore, noise-rock, math-metal, and psychedelia. Featuring notably more vocals than headline-grabbing predecessor Terraformer and a more varied and refined production than classic Challenger, Wonder has ended up a daring but entirely organic tightrope walk between beguiling atmospherics and brutal aggression, short up-tempo miniatures and slow-grinding fuzz-epics, hoarsely screamed songs and drone-driven instrumental passages.