Fuimos Venados
Llan Ticuán
SCORE: 7.2 out of 10
Fuimos Venados’ debut will hardly deliver something new or unprecedented, but to the band’s credit, the tracks’ enjoyability stems more from their sincere and natural delivery than anything else. The album starts off with bursting energy only to become weaker as it progresses.
For the life of me, I never thought I would be triggered by the incorrect use of the word “necrophilia”, and yet, there I was at 3 a.m., making it all the way to the end of Fuimos Venados’ debut album being dumbfounded by a sample of someone stating that “some civilizations opted for a necrophiliac way of thinking, which seeks the destruction of life and natural resources”. Of course, I understood the context and the intention, but still, it was a weird way to phrase it. Perhaps “thanato-centric” or “necro-centric” would have been better terms, but what the hell do I know, I just write grammatically deficient and pretentious music reviews.
I saw Fuimos Venados once back in 2015, on a well-attended show with a, mostly, psych-stoner bill, which is why I was somewhat hesitant about approaching this album, as I thought I would be running into uneventful and predictable desert and stoner rockisms. Fortunately, this is not the case, but I can’t really say that Fuimos Venados defied any expectations either.
With a five-year tenure, the band members seem to be young enough not to be a bland 70s psych revival act, but appear old enough for their idea of “psychedelia” to be something else other than fucking Tame Impala. Fuimos Venados has more in common with the Spacemen 3-Amon Düül II school of grandiose droning garage rock drenched in mystery, than with the sweet and wholesome psych-pop or redundant NEU! wannabes of today. They do describe themselves as cosmic post-rock, and while they definitively have the cosmic and rock parts under their pocket, I’m yet to hear the “post” aspect of it all, but this insignificant technicality doesn’t affect the experience one bit. The band may be using rock instrumentation for rock purposes, but for the most part, it’s not boring rock.
We can hardly say that Fuimos Venados is giving us something unprecedented, but to the band’s credit, the tracks’ enjoyability stems more from their sincere and natural delivery than anything else. Even if they are wrapped under a spiritual cloak too reminiscent of the early Mexican psych-rock and experimental projects which aimed to fuse endemic sounds and philosophy with the styles they were adopting from the U.S. or Europe, Fuimos Venados’ ancestral pride is not too on the nose when it comes to the musical aspect of their whole aesthetic; it is only reserved for their lyrics and live shows. Even the ethnographic samples are used in moderation and add to the narrative arc of each song.
The album starts off with a burst of full-force with “Elementos”, which is actually one hell of an opener. It has a basic crescendoing structure, but its growth is totally organic and its trance-inducing cadence manages to keep the listener hooked; no less could be expected from all-star drummer Sebastián Farrugia propelling the song’s pulse. As the album progresses, though, it starts losing momentum. The band stretches the same formula throughout these four tracks, and while it works in the first half, we hit a dead-end afterwards. The album just doesn’t evolve into anything superior; instead, it becomes weaker when the title track starts.
It could be argued that this lack of growth was intentional, as a way to capture the essence of a cyclical existence, but that may be overanalyzing it a little bit. Furthermore, even if that was the case, the album’s inconsistency cannot be excused because of its concept. Again, to the band’s credit, the songs are enjoyable and the overall experience is far from boring, just don’t expect them to have any major or everlasting impact once the album ends. If we were to align with the band’s cosmic vision, we could say that Llan Ticuán feels like a dying star: it burned bright before just giving up on itself.
