The apocalypse has arrived, so of course it’s good times for post-rock bands from the Constellation roster. After Godspeed You! Black Emperor returned with a brilliant album, translating the badness of the world into thunderous ups and downs in a handy 50 minutes, Fly Pan Am are now following suit. »Frontera« is actually nothing more than the soundtrack to a dance performance, but in the context of, well, everything, it’s much more than that. This is actually an absolutely predictable record: exploratory drone krautrock opens the album, euphoric-elegiac tones slowly creep into the mix. A tension is in the air and intensifies over the first two tracks until it is broken by a dull IDM vignette. Slowly everything builds up again until »Parkour 2« finally picks up the thread of the A-side and actually makes you think of the best Godspeed moments of anno dunnemal. There is another short crescendo until the album crawls towards its conclusion: »Frontier« offers unsubstantial depression-psych-rock that is smothered in noise in the not-quite-as-great finale. From a dramaturgical point of view, this is almost a convenient sleight of hand, just as »Frontera« as a whole sovereignly unwinds old familiar patterns. But Fly Pan Am do this with a doggedness and urgency that puts their previous work in the shade in terms of intensity. So this is what it sounds like when the apocalypse has finally arrived: good times for and with Fly Pan Am.
Frontera
