‘No place is made without a struggle, No place can be our salvation, No place will be built from the rubble, Of the existing enclosures, Of the structures that confine our lives’ (Utopia)

Hailing from New York, Kaleidoscope were initially pretty prolific, firing off a fiercely inventive slew of EPs and the searing After The Futures… full-length between 2016 and 2020.  The band then went into hibernation as members focused on other projects, including Straw Man Army and Tower 7.  But the slumbering beast has been awoken, and its fury has only been peaked by the world’s subsequent trajectory.

Certain parallels can be drawn with Straw Man Army in terms of the sardonic, poetically rhythmic vocals and the fact that both bands are rooted in reimagining their respective 1980s’ anarcho-punk inspirations.  However, Kaleidoscope are, perhaps, best understood as that band’s burlier, angrier, more impulsive sibling.  Their sound has always been defined by an intuitive, organic quality, each member playing off the other in a way that instils a liberating sense of improvisation, yet one honed through the overarching disciplines of an explicitly hardcore punk lens.

Similarly, the band’s political convictions remain utterly undimmed. Lyrically, the album knits together a tightly drawn narrative of human exploitation (‘There’s an engine of greed to the squalor you see’), natural extraction (‘To save capital from its own crisis, to turn life into things’), and social segregation (‘Walled paradise mocks the slum, taking what it wants and leaving crumbs’) that is fashioned to feed the ravenous appetite of capital.  How this entrenched rationality works to breed complicity (‘Toiling in the fantasy’) and to suffocate resistance (‘Only seek the aesthetics of resistance’) is also deftly dissected.

The result is an album of visceral intensity that braids together both a muscular velocity and political vehemence with an intrinsic catchiness, from the bruising Blood Minerals to the darkly infectious White Idol, and from the swaggering stomp of Controlled Opposition to the cathartic escalation of the title track, before the fulminating fury of Utopia.  The album ends on the loosely swirling eddies of the instrumental Dirge For The Disappeared, a brief respite to catch your breath and contemplate the barbarity of the world we have built.