FRANKENBOK – THE ARRIBA WAR HONKLE

But framing that as a tax you pay to get to the good stuff undersells it. The Arriba War Honkle, released on xMusic, is Frankenbok jumping genre inside single songs, sometimes inside single sections, and none of it sounds like six different bands stitched together.

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Thirty seconds from the end of opener "Like Wow," vocalist Hutch stops mid-song and announces, flatly, that he's about to do a big, long death metal growl. Then he does one. "F.A.F.O." does the same trick with a different subject, a melodic "no penis for you" standing in for the entire song's warning about disposable modern intimacy, delivered as plainly as a road sign. It's a throwaway few seconds each time, but it tells you almost everything about how this record wants to be read: theatrical, absurd, tongue in cheek.

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Hutch's vocal range is the clearest carrier of that theatre. He'll move from a smooth croon straight into a guttural bark or a rap-cadence delivery, and it's an important structural mechanism that carries the songs through their emotional gear changes.

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The guitar plays it comparatively straight underneath him. Riffs stay chunky, mid-tempo, groove-based, a stable "real metal" bed that lets the vocal get away with going anywhere it wants. But the record's genre-hopping, its full lurches between groove, thrash, funk and sleaze, needs a second anchor, and that's where the rhythm section takes over. Constantly in the pocket, bass and drums keep everything sitting in the same physical space, so no matter how far the genre mash up moves around, the floor never shifts under you.

You hear that mechanism most plainly in "Geppetto's Scarecrow," where the band strips right back to a bridge of bass and drums alone. The bass doesn't showboat here, it's locked to the rhythm, and when the guitars re-enter, they follow the bass line rather than the other way round.

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It's composition by rhythm section first, everything else built on top after, and it's a neat formal echo of the song's own subject: a lone figure holding its ground against everything trying to wear it down. The bass does the same job the scarecrow does. It holds the line while the rest of the song swirls around it.

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Elsewhere the record finds a completely different pocket. "Casualty" leans into a riff shape and vocal delivery that both go sleazy, closer to Velvet Revolver's loose, off-the-beat swagger. But its 90s attitude filtered through a contemporary mix, tighter and heavier than the era it's nodding to, which stops the homage from tipping into nostalgia act.

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None of this is subtle. It's overt, theatrical, occasionally very stupid on purpose. But once you stop waiting for it to settle into one identifiable genre and start listening to how confidently it moves between them, the record opens up.

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Chaotic, yes. Cohesive, absolutely.

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