Roger Ebert once described the setting of Westerns as a landscape “where the land is so empty, it creates a vacuum demanding men to become legends”. It’s no surprise, then, that the machismo of rock music so often finds itself there. Carlos Santana is the most well-known desert rocker, but its practitioners are too numerous to list. Something about the open spaces, the resonant canyons of the American frontier, invite a sound loud enough to fill them.
These things are always a balancing act—what may sound legendary to its performers can play as ludicrous to a crowd. But with The Whole of Each Eye, Abronia prove themselves to be up to the task. They achieve, but do not insist upon their own vastness. The band also incorporate a huge number ideas from unlikely sources, avoiding the anonymity of all those other grains of sand out there.
More so than Santana, Abronia resemble Malinese Tuareg band Tinariwen. Songs are driven by similarly hypnotic guitar-work and plodding beats that feel like they’re accompanying a caravan of travellers. Occasionally the pace increases for a Krautrock-inflected sojourn—such as on opener ‘Wound Site’—and the result is an apocalyptic treat; the climate-change-era Can. The sparsity of these moments, these oases of stormy weather in an arid world, underlines and emboldens them.
This confluence of styles paints Abronia’s desert as the desert of our future: a culturally amorphous landscape defined by long-forgotten traditions, the artefacts of which can be exhumed from the sand and assembled in new and exciting ways.
The Whole of Each Eye is available to purchase and stream here.
Words by Andrew O’Keefe