Short Reviews [Disen Gage - 2006 - "Libertage"]

Two years after their debut, Disen gage returned with their second album in 2006. With the departure of founder member and guitarist Yury Alaverdyan, the band regrouped and brought in Sergei Bagin as a replacement. The rest of the line-up still being Konstantin Mochalov (guitars, Fx), Nikolai Syrtsev (bass) and Evgeny Kudryashov (drums). It is worth noting that although this line-up stayed together for the next album, 2008’s ‘The Reverse May Be True’, over the years since then only Konstantin has been on every release, but it was this quartet who performed on 2019’s ‘The Big Adventure’. With this release the band had taken their King Crimson investigations into new directions, playing with RIO, avant-garde and experimental weirdness which came to fruition more in their later works. This one still contains a considerable amount of guitar at times, yet they are moving through krautrock and other areas to create something which is quite compelling and certainly outside the norm. The one major issue for me with this release is the sound of the snare drum, which is just too high in the mix and detracts and distracts from the proceedings around it. I can cope with the toms being fairly high as their more bass sound provides a good tribal backdrop, but the snare is just too high up and the reverb which has been applied definitely makes it stand out. That is a real shame as there are sections of this where the experimentation is a delight, taking the listener on different journeys that may be intensely melodic or something filled with anarchy, and one never knows where the adventure is going to culminate. I would probably look to one of their other releases before going to this one, but yet again it is good to have it more freely available.