Camila Fuchs

German/Mexican avant-pop combo Camila Fuchs get the Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember (Spacemen 3, Spectrum) productive zeal of approval on new long-player, ‘Kids Talk Sun’.

Currently based in Lisbon (where the album was produced) the duo (Camila De Laborde and Daniel Hermann-Collini) formed in London in 2012. Releasing debut album ‘Singing From Fixed Rung’ in 2016, they followed with 2018's ‘Heart Pressed Between Stones’.

This new album is a richly textured melange of experimental electronica (‘Sandstorm’), salacious and spacious psyche-conclasm (‘Roses’) and mood-swinging ambience (‘Gloss Trick’) that takes in abstract meditations and compact mediations on childhood (does it ever really end. Does it need to?), the ever-changing communicable forms of how human beings exchange messages and meanings, and the languages within and without nature. This isn’t your standard focus group written by committee radio friendly unit shifting pop product designed to sedate. Oh, no.

Vocalist De Laborde’s intonations range from Bjork’s squawk-talk, Karin Dreijer’s (The Knife, Fever Ray) rhyme-warped warblings and at times evokes Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and her no-nonsense pronouncements.

The music is an array of processed beats, metallic bleeps and looping bloops that at times sound like echoes from the future and visions of the past.

‘Roses’ is an incremental spacewalk, be that particular terrain head, (meta)physical or the outer realms of the starlit constellations. Up there is out there too. ‘Mess’ is a mass of disintegrating dissonance, the collapsing contexts realigning as a unified (w)hole.

The closing ‘Pool of wax’ deals with the vagaries of fate and destiny, as soon as the line ‘I have no option, but to dive in’ is uttered there's only way it's heading.

Above all Camila Fuchs remind that the essence of psychedelia goes way beyond fancy-dressing up in tie-dye attire, wafting joss sticks aloft and banging on about free love (for a price). Through (c)oded lyricism and electronic elucidations they artfully articulate the forward-thrusting propensities and desire for enlightened escape. Even just for a little while.