Pahque has published his second album titled “Frolicking in Polished Metropolis,” a release made up of 10 tracks with an alternative and indie character, ranging from bedroom rock and lo-fi.
In the first part of the album, Pahque gives us a visionary listening experience, if not an hypnotic one. The vocals are treated as instruments that are added into the sound spectrum, in which sometimes guitars take on a greater role than voices.
The ethereal choirs that wrap around the whole mix like rarefied presences are reminiscences, widely reverberated, distant and dilated in the stereophonic image.
And while distorted guitars stratify into uplifting riffs that aim to saturate the whole range of listening frequencies, percussion that are experimental both in timbre and panning move the songs, introducing effective expedients that keep the attention alive.
Surreal and enthralling, “Frolicking In Polished Metropolis” begins as a space-dimensional journey towards an imaginary sound world.
As soon as its title track shows up, around the middle of the album, “Frolicking in Polished Metropolis” takes a more prosaic route, thanks to the more ordinary way vocals are treated. However, even in these tracks Pahque continues to maintain an open-ended creative vision. If in some ways the title track seems to be a twist that sort of resets the entire album, in reality it is only a pivot to change direction, an admirable expedient that introduces the further creative strain that Pahque has at his disposal.
A creative strain that leads us gracefully and intelligently towards further experimentations, this time more focused on musicality rather than sound, as we can appreciate in “Daveswaves” and “At Long Last“, the two numbers that marvelously close this particularly interesting album.