South America has a growing and really interesting instrumental and post rock music scene. There are amazing bands from Chile – Tortuganónima is just one of them and they play really good music, or Jovenabuelo or Sarax – and now I’ve just discovered Baikonur, a band from Santiago that started making their own music since two years ago and their first album makes them a great promise in the instrumental music world. Baikonur consist of five members – the current line-up is Guzman, Ariel Acosta, Carlos Astorga, Rodrigo Nanjarí, and Gonzalo Donoso – and they play beautiful instrumental, post-rock music with spoken lyrics. The proof of what I’m saying is their debut album ¿Quién vigila al hombre cansado? - translated in English the title is “Who Watches The Tired Man?” - that is a collection of seven brilliant and clean songs.
¿Quién vigila al hombre cansado? is a nice listening and even when the sound becomes heavy it’s never strong. What I like most of this album is the variety. Each song has its own character and its particular sound and each one provokes different feelings and sensations. Being a new band this versatility is surprising and really appreciable because the tendency to imitate huge bands such Explosions in the Sky or Mogwai is pretty common among new artists.
¿Quién vigila al hombre cansado? opens in a great way with a soft guitar and the speech of Don Francisco talking about thrash metal. The song goes ahead with the voice of Don Francisco dissolving in rising guitar riffs and drums. The sound becomes progressively heavier till exploding before ending and following into the next track. 'Cuestiones Positivas', the opening track, is really beautiful and makes me think about a song I love so much that is ‘We Choose to Go to the Moon’ from the post-rock band There's a Light.
If the first song has a melancholic vein, the following ‘Caprile’ is joyful and probably the happiest song on the album. It has a nice rock beat with great guitar rhythm. It’s like being in another album. Variety is definitely the characteristic of this album! ‘6025 Dias Sin Luz’ is maybe my favourite song from ¿Quién vigila al hombre cansado?. I love the soft sound with the sobbing guitar effect on it in the first part of the song where melancholy is the predominant feeling. Towards the half of the song the rhythm changes completely becoming heavier with an explosion of instruments that create a notable wall of sound.
Passing through the soft and melodic ‘Punto Jonbar’ we arrive at ‘Auguri’: almost 5 minutes of layered and distorted guitars and pursuing beats that cross the boundaries of the classic post-rock. The last 10 minutes are the last two songs of the album. ¿Quién vigila al hombre cansado? leave us with two amazing tracks that demonstrate the talent of this new band and let us hoping to listen soon something more from them. ‘Harry Haller’, the longest song of the album, is a journey best taken straight from the beginning to the end meanwhile ‘Politica de Estado’ is the shortest one that has a soft guitar sound working as background to the political speech of Werken Mapuche.
I like ¿Quién vigila al hombre cansado? and I appreciate the Baikonur’s style. These guys deserves our attention and we deserve to listen more from them.
