Bandcamp You can review this record by reading its tracklist. Position four is a solo steel-string fingerstyle piece with slapped strings and knuckles on the body, no band at all. Position six is twenty-seven seconds of a French radio jingle. Position seven is a cover of Aya Nakamura’s “Pookie” played as trap metal, complete with 808 subs, trap hi-hats and pitched ad-libs, ending in a sludge breakdown. Position ten spends nearly six minutes on dark synth ambience before dropping into a monolithic doom wall and staying instrumental throughout. Somewhere in among that there is an industrial metal band from France.
The whiplash is clearly the design rather than an accident, and Heckel & Jeckel have the rhythmic grip to carry it. “Egomaniac” is the clearest proof, lurching between blastbeat chaos, a dry funk groove and a sludge crawl inside one song, and the drums stay legible and unhurried through every handbrake turn. It is also the best-sounding thing here, because the master left it room: honest kit, no artificial thickening under the kick, cymbals with air. “EJM” goes the other way deliberately, a rehearsal-room recording where the bass carries the verses on a mid-forward growl and the guitars arrive as a raw scrape with no string separation at all, and the crudeness suits a song built entirely on the jump between a minimal vamp and an uptempo eruption.
What actually unifies the album is the voice, which spends most of its time as a deadpan spoken baritone parked dry at the very front of the mix and then tears into hoarse shouts when a chorus demands it. That register shift is the through-line from the NDH-flavoured opener to “Smile (you can’t kill them all)”, where gang chants and scanned shouts do the work, to “Relapse”, where the same low rasp cuts through a sawing guitar bed without effort. The Nakamura cover is the joke that lands, partly because they play it straight enough to work as a song and partly because a French pop hit is exactly the right thing for a band this contrarian to take seriously.
The reservation is not the chaos. It is the mastering. Almost everything here is dry, compressed and pushed for level, and while that gives the riffs a real physical punch it costs the record any sense of depth. The upper middle stays hot across most of the running time, the cover in particular sits pinned against its limiter, and across thirty-five minutes the effect is genuinely tiring. Notably the three tracks that were allowed to breathe are the three best: “Egomaniac”, the acoustic interlude, and the closer “FI”, whose whole power comes from the size of the gap between its ambient half and its collapse.
Corbacs in Black is a smart, funny, deliberately unstable record from a band with more range than most, and it is the kind of thing Bitume Prods should be putting out. Play it in one sitting, expect to be thrown around, and accept that by the end your ears will want a rest that the record never gives them.
Most of this album is mixed dry, close and loud, with the voice parked right at the front and the guitars given a hard sawing edge, which suits the riffs and gives everything a real physical shove. The cost is depth: there is very little sense of a room anywhere, the upper middle stays hot for most of the running time, and the trap-metal cover in particular sits pressed against its limiter until it starts to tire you out. The exceptions are the three quietest decisions on the record and they are the ones that work best: the noise-rock track where the kit sounds honest and unprocessed and the tempo changes stay legible, the solo acoustic piece recorded with its full dynamic range and every string slap and body knock intact, and the closer, whose six ambient minutes exist purely to make the doom half feel enormous. Where the arrangements get dense the guitars and bass stack up in the same lower and middle ground and lose their separation.
Standout tracks: Egomaniac, FI, Pookie (Aya Nakamura cover)
