Album Review: Kryptograf - Kryptograf

I am Sisiphus, cursed to push the rock uphill day after day, only for it to roll back to the bottom. It's a thankless, useless, futile task, but one considered a duty. In this metaphor, I have been pushing for years to find the next great old-school, vintage rock band, only to find my hopes sitting at the bottom of a steep slope every time I think I have reached the top. The first three Graveyard albums are so great that practically nothing has measured up, and it has started to feel like no other band will ever reach an extended peak of greatness like that again. Blues Pills had one album before souring, The Black Marbles had one great album before breaking up. The sound seems cursed, and now Kryptograf is the latest to try to overcome.

Opening with "The Veil", Kryptograf has a heavy blues riff to pair with lighter verses where the guitars jangle with a saturated 60s sound. It's a marriage of early Black Sabbath with classic rock, and it works together. There could stand to be a more defined vocal hook, but one song into the record they establish who they are and what we should be expecting from the other tracks. Their blend of old influences leans a bit heavier than a lot of other bands trying to resurrect the past.

The booming chords in "Omen" remind me how much space gets opened up when the guitars aren't overly distorted like modern rock, when you can hear the grain of the amp sloughing off the strings as they're hit. Production is an important element of music, and these songs wouldn't work as well if they were polished in a modern setting. The guitar tone is as much an element of the record as the songwriting. I just with they were both up to the same level of quality.

Kryptograf, like many other bands, has elements of greatness in their sound, but they don't quite put it all together. The sound is perfect, and they have a way with their heavy riffs. Instrumentally, the band is exactly what they should be. Where they struggle is where a lot of them do, with the vocals. The voices themselves are solid enough for the style, but there aren't melodies that stand out the same way the riffs do. If you were to make this an instrumental record instead, we wouldn't be missing out on much, which is a damning statement. Yes, rock is based on power and riffs, but you still need to have melodies and hooks to be more than a group of people playing instruments. Songwriting is what every style of music comes down to, and Kryptograf borrows too much from lazy psychedelic times to succeed in the here and now.

So what we end up with is yet another vintage rock album that falls short of greatness. Kryptograf has potential, and they certainly could be a great guitar band, but right now they need help getting their ideas forged into songs. There aren't any here that stand out, none that will truly be memorable. The good work they do is wasted by songs that don't make the most out of them. The record is a nice sounding throwback, but that kind of nod to the past only works once. To listen repeatedly, you need to have the songs, and Kryptograf doesn't. Not yet, at least.