Track Listing

1. 7.08
2. Wyriwys
3. Kyoto
4. Torvalds
5. Seattle
6. Bollingen
7. Solar Flare
8. Fallujah
9. Genoa
10. Davos
11. Evian
12. Fibonacci Unfolds

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #328604 in Music
• Released on: 2005-11-08
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
Knut is the best band you've never heard of, yet they existed in an embryonic and potent form long before most of today's mascara wearing, distortion-peddling metal-ites were out of their short pants. Hybridizing metal, noise, and hardcore while searching for new musical frontiers in their early career, Knut embodied much of what many bands today are still seeking to achieve and did so in splendid form. Ten years on and many albums later, they're still at the chopping block, prophesying a future for heavy music that will take many years for most of us to see, but will only take a listen to appreciate.

Customer Reviews

Pay close attention
Upon first listening to Terraformer I was initially mixed up about it. It was the first time I had heard of Knut, and they were good...but I didn't have the patience to sit down and pay attention to it.

I bought "Challenger" after "Terraformer" and was brutally beat into submission. Lo and behold I found that "Challenger" came BEFORE "Terraformer". It took me awhile to wrap my head around how technical Knut was on "Challenger". This album is the same. Strip away the searing vocals and the muddying production work (no doubt done purposely) and you have an absolutely AMAZING band. Listen to the track "Kyoto" and notice how they begin the song by chopping the riff. I've never heard anything like it.

Knut has grown into one of my favorite bands, and if you give them your ear and your time, I believe you'll come to appreciate them as well. Some of the forays into post-metal/hardcore are pretty standard fare for the genre, but they pull it off. As far as the noisecore/metal aspects...few can match them.

shows promise, but flawed
Metal bands that are willing to push the envelope into more progressive and ambient areas seem to be few and far between, so I was excited to check out the latest offering from Knut, a relatively unknown band on the fringe of the metal / noise / hardcore genre. After listening to the album for a while, I have somewhat mixed feelings on it. Is the album different and interesting? For sure. But does the album actually work? Read on.

Terraformer starts off well, building though a distortion filled intro into the hard hitting "Wyriwys." It's a heavy and intense, if somewhat predictable, metal song. The screamo-style vocals are decently done, but are also thankfully sparse across the album. The problem with Terraformer is that with the exception of the relatively well done "Solar Flare" and the few ending tracks, the rest of the album comes across as a blur of heavy, repetitive riffs, with ambient sections thrown in between. And I do mean thrown, because that is how the album comes across. It seems as if Knut wrote a bunch of individual songs then tried to arrange them into an ambient metal album. There are very few organic transitions between tracks and the overall effect is to make Terraformer seem a little random and awkward. Even the song titles seem random.

It seems as if Knut can't quite figure out what kind of music they want to make - ambient metal or just straight up hard hitting metal. Unfortunately for them, simply inserting ambient tracks alongside more conventional songs is not the same as creating an ambient metal album. All it does is leave Terraformer hanging out in a musical no-mans land. Interesting, yet disappointing to most.

Alas
After 'Challenger' I hoped for another step forward, towards the unexpected, so to say. It turned out to be backwards. It's a shame.