Review Summary: A dazzlingly original piece of work, Róka Hasa Rádió is an audacious, adventurous and masterful perfection of Catafalque’s blackened folk metal.
Tamás Kátai is no ordinary musician. Spending years upon years, album after album developing and perfecting his own style which draws from the atmospheric yet crushingly heavy side of black metal, combined with the booming, suffocating soundscapes of industrial music and spiced up with the elements and instruments of Hungarian folk. Shrieks and snarls straight from the playbook of Mayhem, recitations of poems and ancient tales, breakdowns into clean guitars, orchestral touches and long stretches of ambience. From the unpolished days of 1999’s Sublunary Tragedies, Thy Catafalque’s main goal was breaking down conventions and creating an always expanding world where almost every dark and aggressive musical genre can be part of the bigger picture.
The main theme of “Róka Hasa Rádió” is established right from the album cover, a faded, old photograph featuring a young Kátai with his sister and his grandfather. In fact it could be described best by himself: “It is a concept album about the relationship between the ever evolving, solid and massive physical matter and the fragileness of humans and all living spirits, throughout distant childhood memories and scientific explanations of nature. Revolving, rotating movements of past and future, colors, sounds, long lost scents by a strange transmission from a timeless radio”. And given Kátai’s relocation from Hungary to Scotland, shortly after its release makes the reflection of childhood innocence, and the sounds of the homeland all the more melancholic and powerful on this record.
The challenges in listening to Thy Catafalque lies not only in the density and unpredictability of the songs but often in their lengths as well, and “Róka Hasa Rádió” creates a strange duality by not only featuring some of the longest and most complex compositions in Kátai’s career but also some of the shortest and most accessible ones as well. Another major change is the production which has the stark, harsh, biting guitars and echoing soundscapes, but everything feels a bit warmer, more melodic. The guitars and the drum sound are crisper compared to the previous albums, yet not overly polished and glitzy. Indeed the often demo-like sound were often one of the weakness of the band, but here it’s powerful, epic and truly haunting.
The moment we press the play button we are thrown into the deep water with the first two tracks which encompass over more than 30 minutes in runtime and Kátai uses every second of it for thoughtful build-up and progression. After the first two ominous minutes in “Szervetlen”, the intense, tremolo-picking riffs enter with relenting force with Kátai’s cabalistic shouting echos through the wailing accords. Then we cut to a gentler, folk sounding chorus with snyth-like electronics with clean vocals before the guitars rip through the speakers again. As usual the dynamic, but tonally consistent interchanges between the harsh sections with the cleaner parts creates the bulk of Catafalque’s sound.
Experimentation and variety has always been a major part of the band’s sound, but there’s also a sense of playfulness and a more dream-like atmosphere present here which matches up with the albums main concept. This is especially true for the second half of the record where songs like the instrumental “Piroshátú” sound like something out of a John Carpenter soundtrack only with some occasional pianos and violins added to the background. Or “Katicák, bodobácsok” (“Ladybugs, chinch bugs”) where the galloping, airy instruments pretty much mimics the quick movements and swarming of the small insects.
The sense of wonder, the vast greatness of nature and the unknown, earth, time, space, animals, all the things we first encounter as children are experiences that Kátai heavily frames throughout the whole record. The titles are like titles from children books, the nursery-like lyrics are often sang like folk songs, we hear voiceovers from instructional recordings and the usually harsh, grim atmosphere of a Thy Catafalque album is replaced with a more elegiac approach like how we dig through our own dusty, slowly faded memories, and how the wonders of childhood are now seen through all the pains and sadness that comes with adulthood.
Thy Catafalque fires on all cylinders on this record. Kátai and his music partners (including second guitarist János Juhász and singers Attila Bakos and Ágnes Tóth) display fiercely creative musicianship which cannot boxed into one specific category. Neither the songs. The black metal roots are honored with the theatrical, Emperor-esque “Őszi varázslók”, while “Fehér berek” is the opposite with its calm, almost meditative acoustic guitar lines. “Molekuláris gépezetek” overwhelms us with its massive 19-minute length and constant momentum. While “Űrhajók Makón” is almost shameless in its simplicity and with its enchanting female vocals. It’s the type of song that should be goofy and weird yet charmingly strange and offbeat.
But the two biggest highlight for me are “Köd utánam” and “Esőlámpás”. Both songs blend the metallic, proto-industrial guitar riffs, the folk influences and the rich, heavily textured backgrounds into something that sounds both pitch black yet white as fresh snow. It all crates and energetic, vibrant, difficult to describe yet somehow accessible music, where the soulful, clean vocals about gardens perfectly match to the harsh instruments. If anyone wants to know what this band is about, these track are perfect starters.
If “Tűnő Idő Tárlat” marked the point where Tamás Kátai found his true voice as an artist, than “Róka Hasa Rádió” marks the point where his voice became clear and loud for everyone. All the rough edges of the past releases are shaped into an eclectic, transformative and unique experience which stands on its own even his own discography. Thy Catafalque became one of my favorite musical outlets with this album, and to this day this project is a constant reminder, how one man’s creativity can break down so many boundaries and create music that is original, unique and cathartic.
