TchKunG! – Post World Handbook – Review

TchKunG!

Post World Handbook (Tim/Kerr)
by Lex Marburger

A sonic rhythmic assault like a tractor over your face. A barrage of drums, an intensity that far surpasses punk rock, and a name that symbolizes their sound and impact ¡TchKunG! is similar to almost no one except, perhaps, Crash Worship meeting Worldbeat. With screamed and shrieked vocals, Dionysion drum corps, the apocalyptic sound effects, no guitars, performance art-gone-crazy live shows, but with an added texture of violins, didjeridu, flutes, and the like, Post World Handbook has the feel of a factory riot – workers storming their opressive machines and bringing them low, beating savagely on storage tanks, gears, pipes. If Neubauten were much more tribally based, if Rusted Root actually had balls, they would approach ¡TchKunG!’s sound. There is a definite spiritual element in the music, in songs like “Chao-wera,” an extended drum jam with what sounds like ancient reeded wind instruments, and the Pump shotgun chorus of “Feral” kicks the ass of anything calling itself “industrial” these days. The music of …Handbook is some of the more powerful to emerge in popular music these days. But I do have a problem with the CD, namely the lyrics.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for saving the environment, I understand the eco-disaster that’s facing us all. But if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a fanatic. The kind that rants and rages and froths at the mouth constantly. The kind of person that gives a good cause a bad name. ¡TchKunG! is like a musical Earth First! and includes instructions on how to sabatoge clearcutting operations by “spiking” trees. I have nothing against saving the planet and all, but if the ’60s showed us anything (or even Punk Rock, for that matter), it was that music protest has a minimal effect at best, and results in silly commercialization at worst. Screaming lyrics like “Gonna hunt the wolf now/It’s extinct what have you done” and “If you kill that which is living/You’re gonna find me unforgiving” seems to trivialize the problem. But I find it’s easy to ignore the lyrics, as they’re usually completely distorted anyway. If you hear they’re coming through town, go see them. They’ll blow you away.