Sacred Bones
A band who have obvious influences aplenty, Föllakzoid embrace, upgrade and expand upon the sound of motorik percussion and rippling fx-laden guitars. No matter where they draw from; they let loose five long-form tracks on their second LP which may owe substantial debts to places and times a long way removed from twenty-first century Chile, but which are nonetheless presented in a highly engaging manner.
Listening to
II to while speeding in a train across a foggy winter morning landscape is a perfect way to reflect on the music of what is proving to be a band of highly accomplished psychedelicists. This is music to soundtrack looking out of windows for wolves and more while finding only kine, scouring the mountains for villages and churches perched on slopes parading bare-branched treelines which overlook rain-sodden floodplains glittering softly under a low-hanging, barely-visible sun. Synching effortlessly to the rhythm of the wheels – or perhaps it’s the other way around. The music flows with the sense of spectacle flickering past at seemingly differing velocities, the melodies bright and clear closer to hand while the one-two bass clang and metronomic drums glide by sedately in the distance on songs suitably titled “Rivers” and “Trees,” the
percussion hitting with the relentless motion of a trance-continental railway shuffle.
When there is singing, it’s of the wasted, faraway kind which featured on perhaps a few too many spaced-out records from the nineties on; but Föllakzoid equally know not to use words too often where a guitar sounding like a synthesizer but doing things no keyboard could easily achieve will do more effectively. Which is not to say that the vocals are especially annoying; on “9” they fit the mood well, helping to propel the song ever forward as much as the clangour of chords panning frantically from left to right and points above, adding a human dimension to the journey like a hallucinatory commentary seeping from the carriage PA out there in the world, real or otherwise.
The fifteen ecstatically hypnotic minutes of instant wide-eyed classic “Pulsar” in its extended version completes
II in fine form. Wrapped in a cavernous synth which unfolds like a twirled plastic pipe curling around the sort of muscular rippling drum rolls which devotees of
Can‘s “Mother Sky” (and for that matter,
Loop‘s cover thereof – and is it a co-incidence that Föllakzoid’s début album had a track called “Loop”?) will click with in a heartbeat. They’re one of a recent(ish) generation of bands (see also
Cave,
Holy Fuck or
Mugstar for instance) which fit so deftly into an ever-expanding canon that somehow it seems like Föllakzoid ‘s particular variant of psychedelic music has always existed, bouncing out
modulations of the space-time continuum with a deceptively easy and effortlessly infectious charm.
-1133 Loup-
A band who have obvious influences aplenty, Föllakzoid embrace, upgrade and expand upon the sound of motorik percussion and rippling fx-laden guitars. No matter where they draw from; they let loose five long-form tracks on their second LP which may owe substantial debts to places and times a long way removed from twenty-first century Chile, but which are nonetheless presented in a highly engaging manner.
