Fräkmündt — Urbärglieder
The album offers up fifteen songs & sixty seven minutes worth of music, and it’s quite a varied, atmospheric, sombre to quirky ride. Clearly Sturmpercht; the originators of alpine Folk form are a big influence on the bands sound, but Fräkmündt manage to have their only sonic identity and sound too. At times their sound learns towards a quite stern and winter weathered Russian or Baltic feel, which I guess is the bands traditional Swedish influence coming in.
The tracks vocals are mainly stern & cold soundingly Germanic in there feel, though there are the odd dips into more female choral type vocals too. Musically the tracks are made from a mixture of: layers of acoustic guitars, accordion, Flute, Violin, Hurdy-Gurdy, various often traditional percussive elements, and the odd hint of psychedelic/ blacked synth texturing and effects in the more odd/ drifting ambient moments.
To give you idea of the scope & range of what’s on offer here I go through a few of my favourite/ stand out moments: The jaunting almost rock ‘n’ roll folk jig of “Karfriitigsfüür”. The rising religious female choral vocalizing, accordion ribbed Russian folk, and light folk rock touchers of “Eimelibärg” . The wavering and melting ambience, meets theatrical and creepy male vocals, and unsettling 'walking 'n' door shutting' field recordings of “S'Gschpeischterhuus Vo Stans”. Or the manic warbling accordion & organ waltz of “Soubnnerzog”. Pretty much all of the 15 songs are worthy in their own right, and the album as a whole has quite a rewarding and surprising flow and ebb to it.
As with most things put out by the Percht/ Ahnstern family of labels there’s really thought & effort put into the packaging- the standard edition of the album features a fold out Digipak and sixteen page glossy booklet which is made to look a quirky & old book with pictures of turn of the century alpine dwellers, alpine house, and lost of old drawings of leeches!. The ltd edition comes in a hand made wooden box with a sticker, a t-shirt, a glass of Mondmilch, a jigger, stones from mount Pilatus and a small book of old Swiss sagas.
So all in all “Fräkmündt” is a consistent and varied debut album which will very much please those looking for atmospheric folk music that mixers together traditional European folk with more quirky and experimental edges and textures.