Mint Field—Sentimiento Mundial

The cover of Mint Field’s Sentimiento Mundial is unassuming; a camouflage of desaturated pastels mustering semi-coherent suggestions of shape. But the longer you look, the more it reveals a plumage of vibrancy and fine detail, a Klimt-like depiction of fog-swathed blossoms. The album itself works similarly, gathering like mist until it utterly engrosses you.

Sentimiento Mundial feels modest, ascribing a greater value to listeners’ experiences than displays of virtuosity. Vocalist Estrella del Sol performs stunningly in every song, but barely raises her voice above a whisper (channelling of the tender power of legendary vocalist Jarboe). Callum Brown’s drumming is tight as a whip and invisibly energetic; a heartbeat which has been assimilated into the other assorted gurglings of the body, but without which the album’s vitality would be lost. Sentimiento Mundial as a whole gestures towards krautrock—in groovy repetition, but also in understated, seemingly effortless precision. It’s the introvert’s version of the guitar solo; a performance in which not a foot is put wrong from start to finish.

Precision isn’t everything, though—and krautrock is a limiting comparison. Sentimiento Mundial is freakier and more lysergic than most music from that scene. If Mint Field have exhumed the bones of neu!, rather than slavishly piece their skeleton back together, they’ve made a pagan effigy and slathered it in flying ointment. The entire album is peppered with unassumingly bizarre touches. Opener ‘Cuida Tus Pasos’ has a shade of Jandek’s “first acoustic phase”; pitting its vocal and guitar melodies against each other for a tone of isolation, miasma and malaise. This easy dissonance can be heard throughout, and later cleaves ‘No Te Caigas’ into discrete halves. ‘Nuestro Sentido’ feels—impossibly—like an MTV Unplugged version of My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything.

Not only do Mint Field pull these excursions and experiments off, they preserve beauty and coherence through them. A great vocabulary serves both scientists and poets alike. The tools don’t dictate the job. Some musical experiments are like sitting through a linguistics lecture; Sentimiento Mundial is like reading Emily Dickinson.

Sentimiento Mundial is available for purchase and streaming here. Releasing 25th September.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Dehd—Flower of Devotion

In what has become their trademark, Dehd take a consciously no-frills approach with new album Flower of Devotion. The trio are courageous enough to shed window-dressings of cool and quirk to produce lean, focused music whose power resides in its simplicity. This doesn’t belie a lack of ambition—instead speaking to a rare confidence and conceptual rigour. It feels like before they even recorded a note, Dehd knew exactly how this album would sound.

In fact, they probably did. Flower of Devotion, more than any album in recent memory, sounds like it was recorded live. Anyone who’s listened to an album by Aussie psych band The Murlocs can attest to how great that can be. The timing couldn’t be better, as thousands lie in desperate drought of live experiences on measly hits of studio-recorded methadone.

And, like a gig, Flower of Devotion compresses and steals time. You’re propelled through the album like a bullet, barely touching the sides before you’re done. Songs rarely break the three-minute mark and repetition is used to pounding effect. Eric McGrady’s sloppy George-of-the-Jungle drums are so infectious I wouldn’t be surprised if they extend lockdown for a few months.

This sense of fun is what characterises Dehd against a wave of sadcore indie music. The genre overflows with songs about ones that got away, ones who never showed up in the first place; you get the idea. Dehd don't seem to interested in this, and aren’t so insufferably self-conscious to worry more about their categorisation than their content. It feels like they just love the sound of electric guitars, drums, and amplified voices, with a mentality which could easily transfer to ale-chugging party metal.

Like Hookworms (before their unfortunate career-ending controversy), or indie elder gods Black Kids, Dehd capture everything the genre has ever hoped to. They achieve the magic trick of simplicity that’s impossible to replicate or analyse. Flower of Devotion is never trite, never frivolous, but instantly makes the world feel like an easier place to be in.

It has a sound which is now nostalgic, carrying associations from before politics was a theatre of reactionaries, incendiary enough to split families; before the internet was awash with apathy and cynicism, and anything felt possible. The sun is shining brighter today than it has all year long. I’m not convinced Dehd didn’t summon it.

Flower of Devotion is available for purchase and streaming here. Do yourself a favour.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Ohmme—Fantasize Your Ghost

Fantasize Your Ghost, the second album from Chicago rock duo Ohmme, contains both gentility and fearless invention. This contrast, and others like it, generate a good deal of the LP’s strength. By turns, it can sound muddy and psychedelic, yet clean and precise; anthemic but emotionally intimate.

Virtuosity and experimentation are ever-present, courtesy of bandmates Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart. Their flourishes are not self-serving—they instead serve the band’s drum-tight songwriting. It's clear that Cunningham and Stewart are both superb musicians. But they have no desire to flaunt it, no performative swagger. Less focused, and more egotistical artists swamp or obscure their work in itself. This duo’s noodling usually supplements their songs’ thundering crescendos, nestled unobtrusively in the mix. There’s too much to cover here—but some squeals and pizzicato plucking in ‘The Limit’, and gentle panning drones in ‘Some Kind of Calm’, serve to elevate the material.

Opener ‘Flood Your Gut’ is a gorgeous piece somewhere between PJ Harvey and Syd Barrett, whose elements disperse, elongate, and entangle through its second half. ‘Selling Candy’ stretches the extremities of Ohmme’s sound still farther, with sweetly-sung close harmonies in a call-and-response with overdriven guitars.

Elsewhere, ‘Some Kind of Calm’ pulls of the rare trick of pretending it’s not doing anything. Like a duck whose legs thrash underwater, it glides past seemingly without effort. But a million subtly-deployed tricks in its playing and production ensure it heavies the eyelids seductively, lulling and soothing instead of boring.

And on the total opposite end of the spectrum is ‘Sturgeon Moon’, a jagged and raucous song where Ohmme wear their sense of play most proudly. In the song’s melodic angularity, and through the John French-esque drumming of Matt Carroll, the ghost of Captain Beefheart is revived. Perhaps its sturgeon is a distant cousin to the trout of Van Vliet’s mask.

Though a glib comparison, that Ohmme recall Beefheart speaks to their greatest credit. Ohmme are rare, in that they recall the genuinely interesting facets of classic psychedelia, sustaining and surviving its spirit rather than its barest and most superficial aesthetic qualities. In the soulless and commercial world of neo-psych, beacons of artistic freedom like Fantasize Your Ghost shine even brighter.

Fantasize Your Ghost, released June 5th, is available for streaming and purchase here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Abronia—The Whole of Each Eye

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