Plök

Infolympics

Written by: PP on 27/11/2013 00:16:01

The trouble with reviewing experimental music, especially art rock, is that sometimes bands venture so far outside of what is considered normal that it's difficult to draw parallels to any other artist in your review. That is also the case with Copenhagen/Odense based Plök, whose sophomore album "Infolympics" is a playful art rock album in its most experimental form. It's a record that's a considerable departure from their debut album, one that sees them explore everything from math rock (Battles) through electronic music (all the way to Daft Punk) and everything between for a curious soundscape overall.

One more problem with reviewing "Infolympics" is the approach you take towards it as a music critic. You can't really review it as a rock album, because it ventures so far outside the realms of the genre through its effect-laden soundscape, vocals that are delivered through an electronic filter, and a constant experimentation with chaotic keyboards that you'll find at some of the more underground electronic music shows. At the same time, there's enough grooves, enough stuff considered as riffs to prevent you from assessing it as an electronic album, simply because the mathy rock sections place the band somewhere right in between the two genres. While that isn't unusual - see any electronically infused mathcore band for instance - it is at least different, because you won't find any of the same spastic instrumentation that goes in every direction at the same time. Instead, Plök have developed a very thorough, artistic sound that combines more genres than I care to mention into one so seamlessly that it's impossible to pigeonhole the band into any one of them at once.

While the electronically enhanced vocals may remind you many a band you might encounter at for example the experimentation-friendly Roskilde Festival, they are used sparingly enough to leave for plenty of passages that are either all-instrumental explorations of the electronic musical universe, or at least ones where the vocals are left in more of a backing role to allow for the guitars to experiment with math rock and effects pedals to almost no end. Oftentimes the aforementioned would lead into an inconsistent mix of doing weird stuff just for the sake of sounding weird, but that is simply not the case here. Instead, Plök's weirdo expression on "Infolympics" sounds uniform throughout the record. This is how it sounds like when a band has found and clearly defined their own sonic identity, friends, which is simultaneously what makes Plök very good on their sophomore record.

Download: Trance Atlantic, Digital Gatsby, Tribulations,
For the fans of: Battles, Daft Punk,
Listen: Facebook

Release date 19.06.2013
Target Distribution

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