HOLOCENO

Holy crap! This album is amazing, and easily one of the most impressive from 2021. Certainly, it is the most impactful debut of 2021 that I've heard. If I had to pigeonhole the band, I guess I'd call them prog metal - but there is so much in their music, as can be seen from the tags they've used on their Bandcamp page. While not sounding really like any of these, Papangu is reminiscent to me of a melange of Magma and Mastodon, generated by Guayo and Gentle Giant, blended with Bowie and Bubu, curated by King Crimson and Kayo Dot, and overseen by Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Shining. Honestly the sheer eclecticism of Papagnu's sound is amazing just in the way it is all pulled together without sounding convoluted and impenetrable. The music is avant, but accessibly so.

One of the Bandcamp tags is 'Zeuhl', and you can certainly hear several elements of this in Papagnu's sound - and in particular in the martial rhythms that pervade the album. However, rather than sounding otherworldly, they sound rooted to the geographic origins of the band. I'm not at all familiar with Brazilian folk music, but much of Papangu's music sounds traditional and tribal. Even the psychedelia of their music is less from the hallucinogenic qualities of Pink Floyd and Hawkwind, than from Psilocybin and Ayahuasca. I love how much of their own culture Papangu has poured into their music, and melded beautifully with styles from across the world and across the ages. I have railed against the term world music in the past, but with Holoceno, Papangu have created some superb world music, boundless in breadth, depth and inspiration.

Holoceno is an incredibly ambitious album for a debut, and it could so easily have fallen flat on its face. Rather, it so very quickly attained an almost cult status, that only five or six months after its release, it was unsurprising to see it appearing in so many end-of-year lists. Yet, while there has been a social media storm over just how mind-blowing this debut is, it's been largely contained to metal circles. And that's a great shame, as while there's no doubt much for metal lovers to get their teeth into, there's so much more, and (particularly if you like either the French or Japanese brands of Zeuhl) plenty for adventurous listeners willing to give this band a listen. The execution of Papangu's confluence of sounds and styles is exceptional and flawless, the musicianship is of a very high level, and the album has beautiful production. This is the sort of innovative album that the phrase "it shouldn't work" was made for. But it does. It works in a magnificent and addictive way, and I can't wait to hear what the band comes up with next. Given this debut was seven years in the making, I rather hope I don't need to wait that long?

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