There’s a plant called Datura. Common names include devil’s trumpet, hell’s bells. Every part of it is toxic. Depending on the dose, it causes hallucinations so vivid and terrifying they’re clinically distinct from any other psychedelic experience — not a trip, but a psychotic break. Karatschai open their debut EP with a song about it, and the music matches the plant: beautiful in structure, poisonous in practice, impossible to look away from.
The Berlin quartet recorded this live at the Eselysium in July 2023, and that context matters. This isn’t a studio approximation of heaviness — it’s the actual weight of four people in a room committing to every note. Joel’s vocals range from a low, deliberate growl to something more frantic when the songs demand it; Stefan’s guitar drowns in the right kind of distortion, the kind where you can still track the riff but feel it more than you hear it. “I Am the Universe” is the centerpiece: nine minutes about heroin-fueled delusions of godhood, the lyrics swinging between grandiosity (“I am a god, a Titan’s son / My eye watches them all despair”) and the gravity that always reasserts itself. The music earns every minute of that runtime — not through complexity, but through commitment.
“Feeding the Dead” closes the EP with a shift toward something more political: propaganda, manufactured consent, the systems that need constant casualties to keep functioning. “You are feeding them but they are not alive / It is shocking what you do just to survive.” It’s blunter than the hallucinatory imagery of the first two tracks, but the riff doesn’t ask for your approval. It just moves.
Recorded live, this sounds like it: the low end is full and room-filling, the kind of bass weight that comes from real amps in real spaces rather than studio sculpting. Guitars sit deep in the distortion without losing their shape — the riffs breathe even when they’re crushing. The mix is close and dense, almost no space above the midrange, which gives everything a suffocating, claustrophobic quality that fits the subject matter perfectly. Between the songs’ different tempos — “Datura” charges forward while “I Am the Universe” drags with deliberate weight — the EP never settles into one gear.
Standout tracks: I Am the Universe, Datura
For a debut, this is unusually assured. Karatschai aren’t trying to reinvent anything — they know what they want to sound like, they’ve recorded it honestly, and they’ve given each song a reason to exist. Three tracks, no filler. Worth your time.