Austin Sound

The Invincible Czars’ third studio album, Fortissimo, lives up to its name in some aspects and lacks in others. With nearly an hours worth of metal-infused, classically-envisaged torrents of sound, odd meters, flurries of distorted guitar, percussion, and woodwinds, Fortissimo has everything a die hard Czars fan could want, and perhaps too much for those unaccustomed. The Czars have made a name for themselves from various multimedia performances around Austin — most notably an annual performance of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, gone mad — and particularly engrossing performances where their relentless homage-ing of composers and ADD death waltzes rings most true. Unfortunately that is not the case for Fortissimo.

The band, obviously talented, seems to be struggling as how to fit their spread onto record. Opening with an original piece from a score written for the silent film “Aelita, Queen of Mars”, the intimacy and mastery often innate in Czars music is absent. Woodwinds struggle to find themselves within their own timbre while duking it out with guitars for sonic space.

Luckily for the Czars, they managed to produce “The Curses of Foxes, Birds and Rabbits”, a catchy, pop-minded number reminiscent of the decadence of TOTO (we all love TOTO, right?). It features one of the few vocal performance on the album sung with confidence and swagger. From that point on, however, the tracks themselves run together into a wash of jarring codas and runaway themes until we arrive at the end of the Czar’s arrangement of Russian folk composer, Modest Mussorgsky’s “A Night on Bald Mountain”. Only then does the listener find some sort of musical semblance. Unfortunate casualties of the mid-album tirade include a reworking of Franz Schubert’s “Erlkonig”, which would have been mildly potent had the over-wrought and scatterbrained material preceding not diluted it.

Continuing, we find “The Troll” a rehearsal joke gone too far which regretfully leads us into the instrumental waltz-on-ephedrine, “Mursketine II,” tinged with a southern-rock refrain making a case for the moderate listen-ability for side B of Fortissimo. In question here is not the Czars potential, technical abilities, or re-arrangements; it’s their ability to produce a cohesive album. It lacks a togetherness, an undercurrent in sound and theme that unites the seemingly haphazard songs. In the end, the album is flat. While Fortissimo certainly hits the proper dynamic, it lacks the expression.

Websites:
www.invincibleczars.com
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