Review: Decortica – Love Hotel

September 9th, 2010 by Oswald Hobbes / Comment on this post

Decortica are currently tied with Keretta for the much coveted position of My Favorite New Zealand Band. Their new record Love Hotel (following 2008′s A New Aesthetic) churns and burns for 31 minutes over six tracks, slamming heavy guitars against Radiohead-style ambiance. There is plenty of hard rocking here, but the band’s greatest trick is the way they push their melodies into unexpected places.

Love Hotel peaks with his first track; that’s not a dis, just a fact. The proceeding tunes are great in their own right, but “Shinkansen” presents every facet of the band’s attack in a tidy six minute package, with a chorus that spirals out of the stratosphere and some astonishingly versatile singing from Matthew Bosher. This is a brand of alt-rock that many have attempted and, ultimately, failed to execute properly, but Decortica hit just the right notes.

The band has drawn obvious inspiration from Japanese culture – love hotels are popular there, short-stay places where couples can check in, get some “rest,” and check out. And “Shinkansen” refers to Japanese bullet trains. So we start with the bullet train, end on the downcast title track, and in between we have songs like “Monster In A Pretty Dress,” “Eros,” and “The Sadness Of Men” – the band is not afraid to go deep, and the more you listen to Love Hotel, the more a coherent concept emerges. It’s refreshing to hear this kind of forward-thinking future rock speed into interpersonal danger zones.

The band Decortica most remind me of is Cave In during their Jupiter phase – this is the perfect soundtrack for brooding during a late-night drive. It’s fairly serious stuff, and you have to meet the gang halfway, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Love Hotel cracked my thick layer of permanent skepticism immediately. For a three-piece (Bosher handles guitar, with Antoinette Lee on the four-string and Tory Staples manning the kit) they make an awfully textured racket; it’s impressive just how well-designed for total immersion the record is. Take, for example, the heady freak-out climax of “Monster In A Pretty Dress” – listen on some decent headphones and you’ll get lost.

Ultimately, Love Hotel does what I didn’t think could be done: it transcends the tired alt-rock paradigm, breathing new life into old tropes and shocking them into action with twists that other bands simply wouldn’t consider. Decortica have the craft and imagination to stand toe-to-toe with contemporaries like Muse; they are the great Kiwi secret that, hopefully, shan’t be a secret much longer. What they do is undeniable.