![#10: Graf Orlock - Doombox
This was the first release in three years from these longtime favorites of mine. Graf Orlock is a four-piece grindcore outfit from California who construct their songs around samples from 80s action movies and create the lyrics for those songs out of bits of dialogue from those movies. It’s a silly, fun gimmick, but the main reason I like them is because of their creative songwriting. They fill these two-minute songs with tons of tempo changes and complex, interlocking parts, all of which are constructed in a way that causes them to stick in my head for days at a time.
Grindcore is the sort of genre that sometimes lends itself to blurry bursts of noise, impossible to tell apart. A few years ago, shitloads of grind kids were all about a band called Insect Warfare, but to me, all their songs sounded the same. Even without the movie samples, I’d never have that problem with Graf Orlock. And the movie samples just make the whole thing more fun, regardless of whether you’ve seen the movies they’re sampling or not. A crowd favorite is their track “Captives Of The Thuggee,” which includes a midsong sample of the “Kali-ma, shok-ti-dae” chant from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, after which they slam into a brutal breakdown, over which both vocalists repeat the chant at the top of their lungs. When I saw Graf Orlock play in 2008, the place went nuts for this song, and the whole crowd chanted along with the singers. On the other hand, “Corpserate Greed” contains a lengthy midsong rant about bodies in the street, delivered by the actor Joe Pantoliano, which I loved and found incredibly amusing for years before I discovered that it was a sample from Bad Boys II.
Doombox marks Graf Orlock’s return to public action after their original singer, Kalvin Kristoff, quit the band in 2009. His replacement, Karl Bournze, sounds so different from Kalvin that it took a bit of getting used to, especially in light of the fact that guitarist/second vocalist Jason Schmidt still sounds exactly the same. When Jason sings a line in his gruff roar, I’ve had years of training to expect Kalvin’s hoarse, high-pitched scream to follow with the next line. Instead, Karl yells in a sort of haranguing, drunk old man tone. The difference between their vocal styles was extreme enough that at first I wasn’t sure if I liked this new EP as much as I’d liked their classic Destination Time trilogy.
I was equally thrown by the relative lack of samples; while the songs still start with them, and the lyrics are still taken from the movies that provide the samples, the midsong pause for a sample, which would then dictate the tone of the next section of the song, was a staple of their earlier songwriting. On Doombox, this technique has been retired completely—all of the songs here begin with a single sample and go straight through from there. Once I got used to Karl’s voice and began to appreciate these half-dozen songs on their own merits, though, I realized that if anything, the songs felt more thematically unified without the midsong samples. The move away from the more obvious use of their “cinema-grind” gimmick indicated that Graf Orlock’s songwriting process was maturing.
Indeed, songs like “Job Hunt” and “South Central” are some of their most coherent and catchy material yet. And while Kalvin’s distinctive voice is missed, Karl’s a good replacement for him—obviously completely different, but in his own way just as distinctive. Plus, the CD that accompanies this 10 inch EP tacks on the entire Destination Time trilogy (Destination Time Yesterday [2006], Destination Time Tomorrow [2007] and Destination Time Today [2009]) as bonus material, for a total of 42 tracks and 79 minutes of music. I played the six new songs on this album, as well as the bonus material—which I already had played to death in years past, but am in no way sick of—a whole lot in 2011. The only thing I could have asked for from Graf Orlock in 2011 was more than six new songs, but it’s apparently on the way—they’ve just recorded a new EP called Los Angeles that will be out in a few months. I can’t wait.](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyf5maIDUH1qzpapgo1_500.jpg)
#10: Graf Orlock - Doombox
This was the first release in three years from these longtime favorites of mine. Graf Orlock is a four-piece grindcore outfit from California who construct their songs around samples from 80s action movies and create the lyrics for those songs out of bits of dialogue from those movies. It’s a silly, fun gimmick, but the main reason I like them is because of their creative songwriting. They fill these two-minute songs with tons of tempo changes and complex, interlocking parts, all of which are constructed in a way that causes them to stick in my head for days at a time.
Grindcore is the sort of genre that sometimes lends itself to blurry bursts of noise, impossible to tell apart. A few years ago, shitloads of grind kids were all about a band called Insect Warfare, but to me, all their songs sounded the same. Even without the movie samples, I’d never have that problem with Graf Orlock. And the movie samples just make the whole thing more fun, regardless of whether you’ve seen the movies they’re sampling or not. A crowd favorite is their track “Captives Of The Thuggee,” which includes a midsong sample of the “Kali-ma, shok-ti-dae” chant from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, after which they slam into a brutal breakdown, over which both vocalists repeat the chant at the top of their lungs. When I saw Graf Orlock play in 2008, the place went nuts for this song, and the whole crowd chanted along with the singers. On the other hand, “Corpserate Greed” contains a lengthy midsong rant about bodies in the street, delivered by the actor Joe Pantoliano, which I loved and found incredibly amusing for years before I discovered that it was a sample from Bad Boys II.
Doombox marks Graf Orlock’s return to public action after their original singer, Kalvin Kristoff, quit the band in 2009. His replacement, Karl Bournze, sounds so different from Kalvin that it took a bit of getting used to, especially in light of the fact that guitarist/second vocalist Jason Schmidt still sounds exactly the same. When Jason sings a line in his gruff roar, I’ve had years of training to expect Kalvin’s hoarse, high-pitched scream to follow with the next line. Instead, Karl yells in a sort of haranguing, drunk old man tone. The difference between their vocal styles was extreme enough that at first I wasn’t sure if I liked this new EP as much as I’d liked their classic Destination Time trilogy.
I was equally thrown by the relative lack of samples; while the songs still start with them, and the lyrics are still taken from the movies that provide the samples, the midsong pause for a sample, which would then dictate the tone of the next section of the song, was a staple of their earlier songwriting. On Doombox, this technique has been retired completely—all of the songs here begin with a single sample and go straight through from there. Once I got used to Karl’s voice and began to appreciate these half-dozen songs on their own merits, though, I realized that if anything, the songs felt more thematically unified without the midsong samples. The move away from the more obvious use of their “cinema-grind” gimmick indicated that Graf Orlock’s songwriting process was maturing.
Indeed, songs like “Job Hunt” and “South Central” are some of their most coherent and catchy material yet. And while Kalvin’s distinctive voice is missed, Karl’s a good replacement for him—obviously completely different, but in his own way just as distinctive. Plus, the CD that accompanies this 10 inch EP tacks on the entire Destination Time trilogy (Destination Time Yesterday [2006], Destination Time Tomorrow [2007] and Destination Time Today [2009]) as bonus material, for a total of 42 tracks and 79 minutes of music. I played the six new songs on this album, as well as the bonus material—which I already had played to death in years past, but am in no way sick of—a whole lot in 2011. The only thing I could have asked for from Graf Orlock in 2011 was more than six new songs, but it’s apparently on the way—they’ve just recorded a new EP called Los Angeles that will be out in a few months. I can’t wait.
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