Thursday 30 November 2017

Les Lekin - Dead With Fear (Album Review)


Release date: November 20th 2017. Label: Tonzonen Records. Format: CD/DD/Vinyl

Died With Fear - Tracklisting

1.Orca 10:38
2.Inert 10:19
3.Vast 08:57
4.Morph 13:34

Members

Peter G. (GIT)
Beat B. (BASS)
Kerstin W. (DRUMS)

Review

After three years from All Black Rainbow Moon (released by Tonzonen Records), the amazing trippy-trio Les Lekin from Salzburg (AT) comes back with another amazing album, Died With Fear (Tonzonen Records).

Since from the beginning, the band have managed their own vision of music by developing long psychedelic suites surrounded by a great stoner sound and a huge rhythm section.

In Died With Fear, the band stays fixed to the compositional canons of their debut album, although this latter sounds heavier and less psychedelic.

The album is composed by four long suites of about 8 to over 10 minutes each, where extreme lysergic moments are interrupted by outburst stoner riffs sustained by great and hypnotic guitar solos.

All the songs in the album travel smoothly and without style falls, almost as composing as a single immense track. Orca, Inert, Vast and Morph (the 4 tracks composing the album) sounds like something in between Weedpecker, Earthless and Colour Haze.

The thing that, I feel, is to be most appreciated in this album is that it sounds like a jam session, where the band seems to be almost abducted by playing the songs, sending this feeling to the listener (at least for me!).

Instrumental music is very often a gamble for musicians. Many bands fall in the mistake of diversifying too much their songwriting or, on the other hand, staying fixed around a common compositional skeleton for the entire duration of an album. In any cases, to be fully appreciated for an instrumental band, today, it is a very difficult task, with the risk to not be understood, or to be understood too late.

Anyway, this last effort of Les Lekin poses as an excellent listening to the whole array of fans of instrumental music, where often the first listening does not make justice. It's definitely not a ‘one-hit-moment album’, and I guess it was probably not the intention of the band to propose something like that.

This album has to be heard over and over again, with no background prejudices and with the awareness that many artists prefer to express their emotions by expanding their notes in space and time.

Words by Bruno Bellisario

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