Xul Zolar - Fear Talk (2018)

Perhaps it is no accident that a painterly quality can be found in the music of Fear Talk, the debut-album of Cologne-based band Xul Zolar, given that their name is borrowed from a famed Argentine painter and sculptor. Constructing imaginary worlds is as central for their music as it was for the artist’s works. But whereas the latter is best known for his surrealist watercolours, the band’s craft tends more towards impressionism. Much like the paintings of the Impressionists, their music conveys a feeling of nostalgia and immediacy, an aura of romanticism.
This dialectic of adaptation and demarcation can be also transposed onto the relationship the band have with the past. Influences and inspirations are not simply repeated and repackaged, but rather refracted through various aesthetic prisms. Rather than broad, domineering brush- strokes of pure pastiche, small touches reminiscent of The Smiths, Talking Heads or Phil Collins are like specks of colour peaking through layers of forward-looking sound. Fear Talk - which was produced by Cologne-based musical visionary Marvin Horsch, is in this way a very contempo- rary record. Here and there processed vocals rise from undernearth synth and guitar, given textural profile by electronica-influenced clicks and cuts; sub-kick samples recall early dubstep. The old is twisted, moulded and shaped into something else.
“Two Months“ - the record’s opening track, introduces the band’s characteristic traits with fe- male-backed airy vocals reminiscent of Chris Isaac or Brian Ferry, over melancholic guitar chords, supplemented by eerie synthesizer, while the second track “Vacuum“, with its poly-rhythmic per- cussion, displays the band’s predilection for percussive excess and rhythmic experimentation. This hopping between frames - stylistic and temporal - acts as a bridge of sorts from the different aspects of the record. Romanticism meets modernism.
Emotion is ever-present in “Fear Talk“, the title song and one of the record’s singles. It serves as an example of the capacity for crafting infectious pop conveying emotional depth absent of cli- ché. “Pursuit“ brings together opposites in marrying euphoric guitar melodies and upbeat drum rhythms with melancholic vocals. The two aspects do not exist in contradiction or an uneasy fric- tion but actually underscore and sublimate into each other and give momentum to the music. “Soft Drones“, another single, stands out as the records most modern sounding and beat-driven track. While most songs on the record betray a great indebtedness indie and post-punk of the 80s, “Soft Drones“ would neatly fit on a contemporary, maximalist R&B hit record - were it not for lead singer Ronald’s forceful yet fragile vocals which lend the track its distinctive mood.
Lyrically the album deals with topics personal - love and loss, as well as fears and tribu- lations existing outside the individual subject. These subjects are broached in an abstract and metaphorical fashion with Fear Talk clearly opting for ambiguity and implicitness, the intangibility, the things which are hard to grasp. That is not to say that it is devoid of content. Heavy handed pastiche and parody as well as dull sloganeering are a plenty in contemporary music, but mere mimicry or the concatenation of platitudes is not enough. Instead an approach couched in a seemingly effortless and unforced élan yet underscored by an intellectual and emotional honesty opens to another possibility and results in something far more satisfying - aesthetically, emotion- ally, politically. What is presented here is a flowering of something gentle and new from interlac- ing and inter-clashing surfaces of something rhythmically robust, sonically angular and synthetic.