If you’re looking for the definition of ‘motorik’, just listen to villalog’s fourth album. The frst track, ‘Dusseldorf Dub’ has that classic piston-pumping mechanised drum sound that provides the rigid spine to an endlessly looped riff that builds hypnotically through repetition. The vocals seems to grow more manic as the song’s five and three quarter minutes progress and the effect is without doubt cumulative. Bleeps and interlooping guitars trailed out over infinite space via the sea of eternal reverbing forge a dream-like experience on ‘Plätscher Plätscher’ before ‘Orange Sunshine’ locks into a pulsating psychedelic groove.
The shuffling beats of ‘Alphavilla’ are welded to a swaggering baggy bass and some explosive guitars. Too rock to be shoegaze, too serrated at the edges to be psychedelic, it once again reveals villalog’s capacity to build a track over some six minutes to so around simple, repeated motifs, the vocals low in the mix and brooding as crescendos burst here, there and everywhere and bleed into the extended uber-motorik workout that is the album’s centrepiece, ‘Bassknopf.’
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The title track begins in krautrock / dance crossover territory before it spirals into spirals into explosive, shimmering psychedelic, with splitnering guitars shattering kaleidoscopically over propulsive drums. ‘NVN’ spindrifts and builds to a whiplash intensity, before ‘Wall of Echoes’ ebbs and flows through an undulating crackle of static to close a truly mesmerising album.
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