"Avant garage punk combined with industrial noise, psychedelic improv and no wave? That's more or less what this Russian band sounds like, and their new album Kolchak is certainly one of the weirder albums that R.A.I.G. has sent us lately. The band is from Moscow and combine a traditional guitar/bass/drums lineup with an assortment of traditional Russian instruments, synthesizers, samplers, pipes, electronics and industrial percussion, and their sound is seriously hard to pin down. Some of the songs on this disc are frenzied noise rock with junkyard percussion along the lines of a distinctly Russian version of Pussy Galore, while others drift through trippy guitar loops, sampled rhythms, electronic noise and weird Russian crooning, or lock into a menacing distorted krautrock groove, pulsating drums propelling ominous sounding synths and groaning buzzsaw basslines. Motherfathers split the album up between the noisy, distorted rock and the improvised psych-noise jams, moving from spacey free-jazz to far-out psychedelic clatter to gloomy post-punk (like the excellent "Mannequin" and "Chemicals Gone To Her Head") on to several tracks that sound a bit like The Birthday Party, all skronked-out and violent and festooned with feedback and slash and burn guitars. What a weird fucking album. It goes all over the place, a dadaist mashup of low-fi industrial skum, Am Rep influenced noise rock, Acid Mothers-style psychedelia, krautrock (LOTS of krautrock), Gothy post-punk, weirdo jazz/noise improvisation, Pussy Galore and The Birthday Party that leaves you even more confused after it's over. I actually really liked this though, in spite of how disjointed and inchoate this album can be. There are some pretty damn good songs on here that could have gotten a lot of play on college radio in the late 80's, and whenever the band gets into one of their grooving krautrock jams, they can really cook. Definitely not for everyone though; Motherfathers experimental noise/punk weirdness is way, way out." Crucial Blast, USA