POWERPLANT - Bridge Of Sacrifice

Theo Zhykharyev, aka Powerplant (a Ukrainian mind transplanted to London who has become a cult figure in Europe's DIY underground), takes everything he'd built in his previous work and hurls it into a crypt haunted by black metal, synth-punk, dungeon-synth, gothic post-punk, horror-punk and garage. The result, confusing on paper as well as ambitious, actually works incredibly well. Rather than a simple album, "Bridge Of Sacrifice" feels like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign broadcast on Cartoon Network at three in the morning. It's dirty, melodramatic, lo-fi, goofy, epic and romantically ridiculous. It's a record that alternates blast beats and Nintendo-style melodies without ever losing its emotional coherence. The perfect soundtrack for an imaginary castle where Bathory, Devo and Cure coexist with a bunch of bedroom-punk teenage necromancers.

Between echoes of the rawest Norwegian demos of the early Nineties, power pop hooks and a vocal theatricality caught between a possessed gargoyle and a punk crooner, Theo sings, wired on energy drinks and melancholy. "Florida" literally tells the story of a vampire tired of his snowbound castle who dreams of moving to the American state. Behind those silly synths, those medieval choirs and those haunted-carnival melodies, a persistent sense of alienation lingers.

Here's music that changes skin every thirty seconds yet still manages to hold a precise course, like a lucid dream that keeps shifting shape without ever breaking apart. "Transactions" opens as a dungeon-synth ritual and morphs into a kind of gothic industrial-dance in the style of Nine Inch Nails. Utterly brilliant in its nonsense, "The Fork" instead reveals a surprisingly vulnerable side of the project, with acoustic guitars and cello spinning a decadent folk tale. Theo proves to be a fine songwriter, managing to pile up unlikely influences while still building a convincing atmosphere.

At a time when much extreme music seems obsessed with its own artistic respectability, Powerplant (now a fully-fledged band) remind us that you can be visionary by chasing down a mad ambition. Excess is the creative engine and the true strength of "Bridge Of Sacrifice", even when the record seems to collapse under the weight of its own ideas. Total failure, or a small cult work? We have no doubt the latter will prevail.

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12/05/2026