“SEMANTIK PUNK
Hear what happens when Polish post-metal punkers disappear completely.

”Adam [Adamczyk, vocals] works in chain store selling watches, Piotr [Leniewicz, bass] is a messenger at a travel agency, Karol [Ludew, drums] used to be a bartender, Rafał [Modliński, guitar] earns some extra money as a Taoist meditation teacher and vegan/raw food diet consultant, and he would like to open a vegan cafe. We’re interested in everything and nothing. Mostly nothing.”
We should pause here to anchor ourselves, in retail sales and services rendered and that narrow cash-grab that masquerades as life. You know, familiar shit. Because these comforting facts of our shared menial existence, very little else about Polish punishers Semantik Punk submits to anything as mundane as financial stability or physical laws. Just possessing an identity grates against the ethos that lies at the core of the band’s new record, ‘abcdefghijklmnopsrtuwxyz’.
”Since 1999, we’ve been playing with the same lineup under the name Moja Adrenalina.” enmails the band as a collective. “At the creation stage [for this record], we didn’t know who we were or what our name was, not knowing where we were going or why. During most of the time, what you can now hear on the album did not resemble music at all. The name Semantik Punk emerged at the very end, in the studio, when we heard these songs recorded for the first time.”
Don’t imagine, that this amorphous writing process begat some kind of tuneless free jazz jam session. A relaxed opener shatters to become the chord-warping title track, which then dumps listeners into a series of hyper-focused retracted-riff workouts that haunt Converge’s chapel without ever sounding like mimicry. Semantik Punk are careful to stamp all their nerve-wrecking experimentation into songworthy forms: “It could be said that our tracks are regular songs, built using irregular rhythm, harmony and language structures. It may make them seem like alternative pieces, but anyone looking for good old song spirit is going to find it there.”
The band raves about working with well-credentialled producer Ross Robinson to more fully realize their soundtrack to a mental patient’s Monday afternoon. “Our emotional and formal constructions could have collapsed if not for him. He did a lot of work with us at a personal, emotional level. He made us play wildly and violent. Thanks to him, everything is big, living and even more unpredictable. He’s like a super-sensitive apparatus for choosing the most intense takes. At its core, his work with us was about energy and being imperfect, which was a counterpoint to our focus on structure and technique.”
The use of sub-verbal linguistic suggestions and a drifting sound dune in closer ‘Pstrokąty’ certainly feed into the ego dissolution that SP offer as their music’s central tenet: “The artist is someone who multiplies [himself] and says, ‘Look, this is what I have done.’ We reduce ourselves and say, ‘Look, this is what’s left.’ “

-Daniel Lake”

“SEMANTIK PUNK
abcdefghijklmnoprstuwxyz

8/10

The most remarkable band you’ve ever seen?

If Ross Robinson (Slipknot, Cold, Korn, Klaxons) was actively looking to put even more miles between himself and nu metal, he’d never have found a more efficient vehicle than
Semantik Punk’s debut. But he wasn’t: the Polish post-spazzcore quartet hit the storied producer up online. Given his long history of working with ESL acts ranging from Siddhartha to Limp Bizkit, how could Robinson not jump at the chance? People come to him when they want cathartic performances, and Robinson does whatever it takes to inspire them - which is what he does with the former Moja Adrenalina.
Not in a manner that anybody could interpret as even vaguely linear - tracks one through 11, Semantik Punk blend elements of metallic hard-core (Converge, Dillinger), noise rock (AIDS Wolf, PRE) and no wave (DNA in the midst of a collective PCP overdose), gussying the chimera up with exceptional musicianship, unnatural angles and an invented language with Slavic roots that gets hilarious results from machine translation software. (The band recommends Bing). Careening in and out of guitarist Rafał Modliński, bassist Piotr Leniewicz and drummer Karol Ludew’s advanced hack’n’slash math expos, vocalist Adam Amdamczyk screams like he has a dozen dicks with a burning sparkler jammed up each urethra - until we get to “Pstrokąty”. At least 23 minutes longer than any other track on the album, the closer spends the better part of its 27-plus minutes being the kind of sweet, cyclonic drone that’d sound killer blasting in a bar.

-Rod Smith”

“MOJA ADRENALINA
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Eight short tracks outta Converge School, with jagged riffing that extends into the breakdowns and melodic parts, keeping an on-edge dissonance and off-timing through the whole thing. And lots and lots of blood-gargling screaming. Vocalist Adam Adamczyk drops surprises like the scatting in ‘Front Żywych’ and the spoken-word-guitar freakout ‘Reakcyjny Knebel’.

-Anthony Bartkewicz”