WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CHRIS KARLOFF?

Chris Karloff, not to be confused with his uncle Boris

In 2006, during the recording of second album “Empire”, Chris Karloff left Kasabian, apparently due to “musical differences” but it’s common knowledge that it was more personal than musical, mainly between him and co-writer Serge Pizzorno.

Since then the man who helped pen Kasabian classics such as “LSF”, “Club Foot”, “Cutt Off” and “Processed Beats” has been practically forgotten by the wider music world his failure to find a musical set-up which felt right for him being the main cause of him being “lost” by the music world, that is until now…

Well, not until right now, until about three years ago when a mysterious new Karloff project emerged from New York, the Leicestershireman’s new home, its name was just as mysterious, Black Onassis.

Black Onassis’ line-up is anything but straightforward, they lack an official frontman to the project, you could argue that Chris is head of operations but Black Onassis is as much as his band as it is the other members’ because instead of settling on a lead singer and frontman for the project the band chose to have different guests on their tracks, three to date, and these guests don’t disappoint, the iconic voice of Ben Gautrey (Former lead singer of The Cooper Temple Clause) features on one track entitled “Brain” and Aurelio Valle features on another one called “Innocence Blitz”.

As I stated before, Black Onassis have “released” three tracks to date, all three feature an early Kasabian sound to them perhaps a slightly more electronic early Kasabian but the sound produced by this band is nothing short of superb. Their sound is quite difficult to define, it’s dark like many of the early Kasabian recordings especially the demos they created whilst under the name of Saracuse, but it features heavier electronics whilst remaining true to a nice psychedelic beat, a trademark of Karloff’s great work.

There’s still quite a lot of mystery surrounding the band though, we are yet to see an album (work is currently ongoing) and they refrain from doing excessive interviews, they let their music do the talking and that’s refreshing to see in a day and age where bands talk-up their new albums and slgg off former band mates to the press. And their music certainly does all the talking a band could ever need, except for one track called “Iso” and that’s only because it features no lyrics but when an electronic instrumental is as good as “Iso” you could only ever really spoil it by putting lyrics to it.

On the live front Black Onassis have been pretty active as well, regularly playing venues in New York such as Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory and with a new album hopefully coming out some time this year things can only get better for this brilliant band.

Rating of first three songs: 5/5

Harry Price

Link to website: http://blackonassis.com/

(Black Onassis: Conroy, Karloff, Forde)