El Yunque – ‘Baskenland’ Album Review.
Cover photo credit: Geert Braekers Photography – Click Here.
El Yunque are a four piece Noise Rock band leaning on sounds from Slint, The Jesus Lizard and Fugazi, as well as modern contemporaries such as Big Ups and Iceage. Their debut album Baskenland is grating and filled with glass cutting guitars and vocals to match; it’s a glorified mess, look at the artwork to get an impression of things…
Opener ‘Kaaiman’ is brief and basically sounds like the art work looks, whereas ‘Kassandra, Esq.’ sounds like if Duchess Says tried to take their scrappy approach to covering a Swans song and I love it. El Yunque work best in four to five minute chunks, ideas are expanded on instead of being truncated, the shorter songs, whilst I still enjoy them, feel a little under par when I’m listening one of the longer tracks from the album.
To follow ‘Kassandra, Esq.’ is ‘Noztechtransch’, which has a great groove going for i,t with the late-era Swans vibe coming at me in waves, which is exciting because grandiose Post-Punk and Noise Rock chopped up and chucked out of someone’s front window down onto the street below is quite a spectacle.
The second half of the song is where the band come under their self-titled description of a ‘Experimental Noise Rock band‘, the wooing of the feedback at the end – if it is even feedback that I’m hearing – coos out like a lonely bird at night and is actually one of those “well wasn’t that nice” moments tucked away in fifty minutes of fistful of steel moments.
Looking at the track ‘Kabeldraad’ and seeing that it’s nineteen minutes in length, you could expect something incredible from the band, this is their debut and they are pushing out a track in the middle of their album that is that long.
So far the band have been concise in their Noise Rock tracks that haven’t really over or under-stayed their welcome. Yet, ‘Kabeldraad’ drags on for too long. Whereas Daft Punk‘s ‘Too Long’ at ten minutes doesn’t feel that long because it’s a really good loop and they’re basically making fun of themselves, El Yunque jam out the same riff that I could have been happy with it all ending at three minutes in, and then at four minutes, but they do take liberties with it and their sound isn’t as punchy and deep as I’d like it to be.
If they had released that and said ‘yeah this is our EP‘ then I’d probably go ‘okay, cool, this is great‘, but somehow on the album, it separates it all and I don’t think the album really needs it, especially when everything is so Experimental, noisy and tight. What disappoints me the most though is the Rage Against the Machine-esque riff at the end that kind of goes nowhere….
‘Reine Reprise’ is a little token tagged on to ease us from ‘Kabeldraad’ and back into the rest of the album and ‘Nátwoord’ is the exact sort of “punchy” I was trying to find in ‘Kabeldraad’ – bring out the spiked baseball bat because we have a winner over here. The track is your favourite band t-shirt soaked in beer, so squeeze it out into a pint glass and have a drink to the band that rivals Cocaine Piss as Belgium’s hardest rocking outfit.
The rest of the album gets into it’s own groove from here on out. ‘Dredge’ is if Drenge tried to do “experimental”, while ‘Druimte’ shows the band can get a short song right, but they only really do so by having this super creepy backing vocal creep in, but fear is a good way to win the heart, right?
Closer, ‘Und Dann, Die Kinder…’ is all artsy in it’s approach to the bands sound, this is where El Yunque really feel like a mesh of all of these bands that are on the tip of your tongue and they play it very well.
Baskenland delivers some impressively sturdy Noise Rock songs, just don’t be scared of the length of ‘Kabeldraad’, embrace it and if things don’t turn out well then you’ve got the rest of the album to enjoy, even though your album centrepiece is at the end of the day a make it or break it track….
Luckily, the rest of the songs rock too much for that to even be a concern. Enjoy.
Find the band via the following links:
- For updates head to the band’s Facebook page.
- For this release and all the bands releases so far, head to bandcamp, iTunes and Spotify.
#StayFresh
