Since forming in 1994, this Chilean five-piece have released five albums, relocated to France and been touted as Franz Ferdinand’s favourite band. The admiration runs so deep that Franz Ferdinand gave Panico free run of their studio and engineer (the criminally under-rated Paul Savage) to record their first album in five years.
Guided by producer Gareth Jones (These New Puritans, Liars, Depeche Mode), the album was done and dusted in a week, and the ferocious energy is poured over practically every song. Opener Illumination owes a massive debt to Joy Division with its muted guitar lines and emphatic drumming, but its main intention is to make as much of a racket as possible. This cause is aided throughout by singer Edu who spends the album singing like Brian Ferry has been possessed by a particularly pissed off Bobby Gillespie. The fact that he continually switches from English to French within the space of a verse or chorus gives the entire album a gloriously unhinged quality.
The songs are driven by some fantastic one-finger guitar playing from the same gene pool as The Chameleons and Gang Of Four. Tracks open with walls of feedback but threaten to become over taken at any moment by manic percussion. It’s all so frantic it sounds like the band was recording in a burning building with one eye on the nearest exit.
Due to the sheer madness, some songs fail to leave much of an impression except for “Huh… Wow!”. It’s an album of three distinct sections: the album begins and ends with songs that are more about mood and style than true content, however they frame a fantastic central run of tracks.
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The first of these is Reverberation Mambo, a swirling mass of vocals that takes an amazingly simple guitar riff, repeats it almost to insanity before disintegrating into a sprawling street-drumming epic. Album standout Algodon follows, which contains a great Ramones style melody and a sing-a-long chorus that The Drums will probably spend their career trying to better. The great succession of tracks closes with the subdued, acoustic driven Waka Chiki which mutates from a Hawaiian pastiche into an incendiary, angular guitar duel.
The unfortunate fact that the rest of the album can’t quite compete with this run means that overall, we are left with an unfulfilling listening experience. The scope and ideas present at the album’s central section means that after repeated listens the songs either side sound a little light-weight. That said, it’s still a great deal of fun (notably Uptown Boy, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Billy Idol’s White Wedding), it just lacks the depth to build on the record’s momentum.
After a lengthy hiatus, Panico now seem to have recaptured their initial energy. If they keep the drive it will only be a matter of time before they deliver their true knock-out blow.
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