FENSTER – The Pink Caves
01. Better Days
02. Sunday Owls
03. In The Walls
04. Cat Emporer
05. True Love
06.The Light
07. Mirrors
08. Fireflies
09. On Repeat
10. Hit & Run
11. 1982
12. Creatures
Recorded in three weeks in a wooden house near the forests of east Germany, that was completely wired to record simultaneously in every room, as singer and guitarist Jonathan Jarzyna explains, the album was mixed some months later in Berlin. An important part of FENSTER‘s sound is as always their focus on sound engineering, made possible by friend and producer Tadklimp as well as the band’s own Rémi Letournelle. Even if it seems like FENSTER‘s favourite and recurring elements are mostly an own version of the classical 50s Americana sound as well as modern pop music and sparely used electronica, The Pink Caves has its own, somehow mysterious flavour, since it’s filled to the brim with those little hidden field recordings of found stuff and broken gadgets, acoustic snapshots and vocal samples, often so deeply below the surface you have to search for them but sometimes surprising enough to wake you up as well.
Grown to a quartet with help of new band member Lucas Chantre, playing guitar and some electronics, they also make an awesome live setup. Songs from their debut standing easily next to the new ones and minimalistic, fragment-like tracks perfectly filling the gaps between those noble arranged pop songs. One of them is 1982 whose broad and dreamful synthesizers reminds us on the year 1982 indeed. Also In The Walls is another of that filigreed chamber pop pieces that sounds like recorded in deep space. Not to forget this beautiful ambiguities like True Love, wrapped in a naïve love song’s habit but overlayed with bitter sweet lyrics sung by JJ Weihl, followed by the darker and pitched down The Light.
With collecting and using their very own and highly versatile box of musical building bricks the band has recorded an album that could be fun for both, those who love experimental and unexpected soundscapes as well as those who searched for 43 minutes of tasteful dispersion. And that is maybe, what The Pink Caves makes so special. FENSTER‘s newest LP is once more able to break such multiple talents down into 12 songs which show their very own conception of pop music. Always sweet but never cheesy, sometimes luxury but always essentially and mostly catchy while staying unmistakable unique.
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