1) Racing With the Rabbits; 2) I Laid It Down; 3) Cracked Messiah; 4) Od Slatrom Ekil
More grim than glam: mystical ramblings and loud guitar walls. The Ark, before they realised who The Ark were.
Key tracks: "Racing With the Rabbits", "I Laid It Down"
The thing to note about The Ark's debut EP (officially self-titled but I've heard this being referred to as Racing With the Rabbits EP too) is that this is a very different band to the one that would finally break through under the same name -
after all, the EP was released four years before the debut album, and The Ark themselves had existed for a good few years before the EP was recorded.
Instead of glittery glam rock and witty lyrics with a sharp tongue, the overall feel here is something more cryptic, noisier on the guitar and occasionally even veering towards dark and heavy. You can still recognise The Ark through the cracks, mostly thanks to Ola Salo's voice, but there's quite a distance
between this and their eventual debut album We Are The Ark. That's something to consider when approaching the EP -
I felt very cold towards this when I initially came across it due to my
expectations being somewhere completely different, but as soon as you can shake that off you can very well enjoy the EP for what it is: a decent four-set song.
The first two tracks are the
most Ark-like. "Racing with the Rabbits" starts like a creepy children's
lullaby thanks to its recorder intro and Salo's downtone singing, but it turns into an
almost-jubilant cascade of choruses the closer the track gets to its end, and you can start to hear the reach for the skies that would become emblematic for them once the band properly got going.
It leads onto "I Laid It Down", which is the closest to The Ark you know (and love?) out of the four cuts, and might have even fit one of the earlier albums had it been polished further. The choral "Oppular!" chants are even something close to fun, which stands out in an otherwise quite po-faced release. They're also, perhaps not coincidentally, the best part of this EP. They're rough but there's enough real quality pushing through: a still struggling band starting to catch onto what they're actually good at.
The course correction hasn't yet quite started to crack on the second half of the EP, and it's this section where the ugly duckling reputation of this release comes from. "Cracked Messiah" is the first lyrical tease of the general territory where Salo and the band would make their home in, as opposed to the cryptic babbling and mythological references of the rest of the release, but musically its hard rock inspirations come across misguided at best, and the dark, murky atmosphere and the heavier breakdowns aren't all that well executed. The final track, "Od Slatrom Ekil" closes the EP on a more distinctive even if still not particularly remarkable fashion, mismashing ideas and elements from the rest of the EP and stretching the concoction to ten minutes, which is about six minutes too many for what it actually offers. I'm a sucker for an epic finale but "Od Slatrom Ekil" tries too hard to be one and just gets monotonous.
It's still quite interesting to listen to this in retrospect, but like many debut EPs its place is in the curio box aimed solely for the fans, and even that comes with reservations given how distinct it is from what anyone would actually consider The Ark's signature sound. And that's not rare, bands quite frequently evolve their sound from their very start to even when they get to a proper studio for the first time, but most of the time there's a clear line between the distant end points. This EP on the other hand is fascinating simply because of how distinctly different it is, even when you can hear some of the same DNA bubbling through. It doesn't excuse half the EP from being rather bland, no matter how hard the band try to sound mystical and artsy, and I honestly wouldn't go out of one's way to seek this out unless you’re a real enthusiast. I would absolutely love to have witnessed this particular evolution in real time when it happened, though - there's got to be some very interesting stylistic experiments in the four years between this and the debut.
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