Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Persons From Porlock
Label: ZARŠ Records
Release: 2016
Duration: 39:13
Rating: 4/5
Persons From Porlock are a musically »off-kilter« Ljubljana quartet, sworn to garage and the rock underground. To shed some light on where the »bonkers« but utterly endearing band name comes from, we need to look at a map and cast an eye toward the British Isles, where, in the English county of Somerset on the west coast of the island, you’ll find the village of Porlock, population barely 1,500. Once upon a time, the legendary British poet Samuel T. Coleridge was writing the verses for the poem Kublai Khan at the end of the eighteenth century when a person from the village of Porlock crept into his dream. Coleridge labeled them an unwelcome guest, an intruder who made the poet lose his inspiration, and he never managed to finish Kublai Khan. It stayed at 54 lines. Even if the whole thing borders on anecdote, the poet must have suffered some seriously nasty trauma from all those nights of being hounded.
Back to the present. In our case, we have four Porlock intruders »on the reviewer’s skewer«, who have torn up the famous painting »Kofetarica« by Ivana Kobilca and, while they were at it, ruined Cankar’s day at the crack of dawn (see the album cover). Persons From Porlock are a fresh-out-of-the-oven Ljubljana garage rock quartet who already back in 2015, on the compilation »Klubski Maraton«, signaled that this is a bold crew cultivating their own polished, recognizable musical character from the very first steps.
Persons From Porlock approach music in an elemental and effective way. Most of the tracks give you the feeling of extended jams, steered into »trip-oid« atmospheres of rapt or detached consciousness. The effects-drenched guitars certainly give off that vibe, wailing the whole way through under the weight of sustain and reverb pedals. The band often borrows single-string motifs that carry the core of the melody over a chosen guitar riff, and the riff itself is fat and rumbling, backed up by plenty of wah-wah. The elemental riffing is hemmed in by a dynamic, active rhythm line that brings an extra dose of adrenaline into the otherwise cerebrally estranged states of consciousness the substance of the album can take you to. Yes. »Things People Don’t Like« is an album with strong psychedelic connotations. Picture Pink Floyd at their very first jam in the mid-sixties, when they’re holding their instruments in their hands for the first time ever. The stoned vocal lines, in layered harmonies, sound a little »extraterrestrial« throughout, as if they were coming from the beyond, evoking a stoned absence of mind. They feel retro, tugging at the turn of the story of rock’n’roll from the sixties into the seventies, around where Hawkwind once popped up too, and when comparing Persons From Porlock to their contemporaries today, you might bump into a whole string of revivalists, led by Tame Impala.
Not that Persons From Porlock copy anyone, but they simply create atmospheres that sound associatively retro, psychedelic. In their riffs they sail fearlessly and exploratively, they don’t overcomplicate their arrangement solutions, and the songs have just the right amount of fluidity. Transitions and sung-verse melodies included. You can feel that the band played the whole album in one take. First try. The arrangements deliberately use »dissonance« tricks, like bending long sustained notes a half tone up or down, and the vocal lines can likewise deliberately stray from the ideal melodic position. All of it is intentional and aimed at creating an atmosphere of stoned, hollow numbness, where Morpheus can easily wrap you in his wings and carry you off to the realm of dreams.
The band’s strength is that it drags into the open things we’d already half forgotten, yet works them into its musical matter unobtrusively, in a highly tasteful, different and, of course, entirely its own way. It wouldn’t be fair to predict where the band will develop and swing next, but let’s hope it sticks to the course it has set. The ideas are simply excellent, and the album is wonderfully varied and lively. No excessive motif repetitions that would otherwise force comparisons with the thoroughly worn-out trendiness of the term post rock.
Persons From Porlock – Forever Sun (official video):
Line-up
Nikolaj Mulej – vocals, guitar
Martin Pavlovec – guitar
Gregor Bajc – bass guitar
Vasja Onič – drums
Production
Gregor Bajc & Persons From Porlock
Track list
1. Slasher Flick
2. Charlie
3. Other
4. Avalanche Peak
5. Forever Sun
6. Pipe Paranoja
7. No Sleep
8. Alprazolove
9. Velleity
