North Carolina-based Megafaun’s self-titled new release is a psych-pop avalanche, replete with pastoral soundscapes, nerve-jangling avant digressions and enough pleasing melodies to make its kitchen-sink approach palatable over its hour-long run time.
Opener “Real Slow” literally and figuratively sets the tempo, marrying appealing vocal harmonies to a languid pace that threatens to cross into torpor. The eight-minute-plus “Get Right” is a catchy psychedelic guitar workout featuring a welcome energy alongside the full “Tomorrow Never Knows” tool kit of backward guitar, droning feedback and musique-concrète-style found sound. “Hope You Know” could be a Neil Young piano ballad circa “After the Gold Rush,” while “Resurrection” is a lifelike simulacrum of a road-weary Grateful Dead rambler.
Among its contemporaries, Megafaun is sometimes referred to as a constituent of the asinine faux-genre known as “freak folk,” but the band’s clear antecedents are in 1960s rock and ’50s country traditions. Its passionate embrace of the past serves as a blessing and a curse for a group laden with talent and dexterity. The music is handsomely rendered and sumptuously recorded, but the triptych style and lack of a strikingly individual narrative approach constantly threatens to drive the album into overt pastiche. A stark humorlessness characterizes the sentiments of lost love and spiritual seeking, a self-serious approach that is frequently undermined by lyrics that can feel over-referential and trite.
This is the essence of the Megafaun paradox. Pitched halfway between costume drama and genuine catharsis, this fine and agreeable album nevertheless begs for the emergence of ideas that are distinctly its own. Gifted as Megafaun is, it seems a good bet that these will emerge in time.
— Timothy Bracy
Recommended Tracks
“Get Right,” “Hope You Know,” “Resurrection”
_1329862681.jpg)
Loading...
Comments