Abraxas: 'Monte Carlo'
Today sees the release of Abraxas’ debut album, ‘Monte Carlo’, released on Suicide Squeeze. You may not have heard of Abraxas, but you will have heard of its members. Carolina Faruolo, formerly of Los Bitchos, and Danny Lee Blackwell, of the multimillion-streamed Night Beats, have been friends and fans of one another for many years. Always harbouring a desire to collaborate, their plans were time and again made impossible by the geographic distance between them. That was, until lockdown.
Abraxas is a lockdown project, one of the thousand musical projects permitted by the shrinking in distance facilitated by Zoom, and the fire lit under musician’s arses as boredom set in during isolation and new artistic directions were imagined. But of all the lockdown projects I’ve listened to in the years post-Covid, ‘Monte Carlo’ is the least-lockdown. Almost timeless in its camouflaging of influences, the way the songs conceal the artist’s intention, there are no references to sitting alone anxious, hoarding hand-sanitisers, or bingeing ‘Tiger King.’ In fact, there is little reference to any of the events in the outside world. This is because ‘Monte Carlo’ creates its own world, a subtropical “world filled with jungles, mist-covered rivers, panthers lurking in the night, desolate shopping malls, Neolithic citadels and sand-worn walls,” as Blackwell describes the inspiration behind the album.
Driving the album is a hypnotic pulse, a beat overlaid with psychedelic guitar leads and Blackwell’s distorted vocals. Notably this tryptic can be heard throughout the album’s first six tracks, with mild variations, for example, in ‘Mañana’, when the album takes on a funkier vibe, or in ‘La Estampida’, where the beat driving the track is more suggestive of breakbeat. Overall, the tracks on this album are overwhelmingly influenced by cultural genres, Latin, or Eastern styles. There is an Arabic swing to the album, and you expect at times for the songs to fall into strange time signatures or introduce unheard instruments. Lovers of Acid Jazz or fusion genres especially should expect to enjoy this album, as time and again the songs take strange turns into underexplored generic alleys.
I would, however, add a note of caution to listeners thinking such experimentation and wide influence might equal variation. There were times when listening to the album that I hardly noticed one track melt into another, and others when I picked up my phone to double-check tracks had changed. Part of the psychedelic nature of the tracks on this album means songs blur into one another like the fractals of a hallucination. This, undoubtedly, is part of the intention with a pair of songwriters who are so focussed on the texture of a song above, say, the distinctness it may gain by featuring unforgettable riffs or lyrics. More variation does come in the second half of the album, with tracks such as ‘Fuji’ slowing the album’s tempo, or songs such as ‘Golden’ wearing the face of a ‘King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’ track. But listeners should accept the tone of the album being something constant, a warm bath into which you must sink, or a dark forest filled with bloodsucking bats and glowing mushrooms from which it is hard to escape.
This is a nice album, something to listen to the whole off. It’s not an album from which listeners can cherry-pick tracks, but one people must embrace for what it is, a genre-fusing soundscape born through the collaboration of two distinct artists.
