Panico

Kind of forgot about this one, which I must have written three months ago about the Chilean post-punk outfit Panico, whose latest album is called Kick and which came out late last year on Chemikal Underground. My review ran yesterday at Blurt.

Panico recorded this sixth and latest album at Franz Ferdinand's Glasgow studio, and for the first couple of tracks, you might almost be fooled into thinking they are run-of-the-mill post-punk revivalists, prone to the same sharp edges, the same jittery romanticism as Franz and the legions they've spawned. There's nothing wrong with album opener "Illumination"'s bass-led, stutter-stepped, robot-funk, or with the briskly ominous, patent-leather alienation of second song "Icon," just nothing remarkable. None of us are heartily sick of post-punk now, in 2010, as we might have been half a decade ago, so it goes down fairly easily, its clipped guitars and vaguely menacing vocals eliding into a not-bad experience of late-1970s-referencing dance-punk. Yet as things move along, Panico, who are from Chile, allow more and more of their South American eccentricities to show through, and it is this, not the color-by-numbers Gang of Four homage, that makes Kick such a pleasure.

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Here’s “Icon”.