Silent Machine, the debut album from Australia’s Twelve Foot Ninja is a fascinating and fun record from a quirky, original band. On its Australian release it hit number 4 in the AIR (Australian Independent Record Labels Association) chart and the band’s videos have garnered more than one million YouTube hits.
The album’s 12 songs were originally released over 12 weeks, each one accompanied by a digital comic created by UK-based Keith Draws, and all linked to the lyrical narrative. With all of this activity, and praise from the likes of Mike Portnoy and Fear Factory’s Dino Cazares, Silent Machine is clearly an album worthy of further investigation on its European release this month.
It doesn’t take long to appreciate the Twelve Foot Ninja experience; a heady, often eccentric, mix of prog, alt metal and quite a few stylistic surprises. The press release accompanying the record describes it as “heavy fusion” and there’s no doubt that Twelve Foot Ninja are – in large part – about music where influences coalesce and disparate styles sit happily together to produce something original.
Opener ‘Coming For You’ combines math metal, latin and funk in a kaleidoscopic attention grabbing piece (head to YouTube and watch the hugely entertaining video; I defy you not to warm to this band on the strength of that alone).
Across the album influences are many and varied: whether it’s the prog of ‘Kingdom’ with its vocal harmonies and wonderfully retro electronica; the reggae sections of ‘Mother Sky’; the ‘70s style electric piano and lightness of touch of ‘Aint That A Bitch’; the hint of carnival in ‘Myth Of Progress’; and the regular reprise of latin rhythms, all topped and tailed with the kind of heavy music you’d expect to be reading about in Ghost Cult. Even if Twelve Foot Ninja were to dispense with the myriad styles, I suspect the arrangements would still be rich and many-layered. To borrow a cinematic analogy, this band has a fully formed and very individual mise-en-scene.
The two bonus tracks included here are easily strong enough to have taken their place in the album proper had that been feasible, and are testament to the band’s musical quality. There is enough diversity of content throughout the album to keep the listener coming back again and again. If you can, try to catch them on their upcoming European dates; and certainly give this excellent – and slightly bonkers – album the attention it deserves.
8/10
Ian Girlie