CD Review

Artist: Hinterland

Title: Pan Pan Medico

Label: Submerged Records

Publicity: Killbeat Music

Website: www.hinterland.bc.ca

Released: February 19^th 2008

3 ½ Stars

Reviewed By: Kindah Mardam Bey

Hinterland is the wrong name for this band, the CD cover is false advertising. With such a great punk band that Hinterland actually is, why make them appear as though it's a crusty garage band? We get the catchy reasoning of the double meaning behind the term ‘hinterland' and what it represents as a punk band and why the charcoal drawings, and puce green CD cover has a detached head with its thoughts falling out of it like a rolled open potato sack (trust me folks, I've found you a much better picture seen above), but the name, nor the CD cover gives this band any credentials to a larger audience. Simply ‘them in the know' will get the subtle undertones, but others who would like the music who don't recognize the album title Pan Pan Medico as a nautical distress signal will simply pass by music worthy of recognition. This would be my biggest complaint about Hinterland, as the music is highly effectual in execution.

Hinterland sounds like a good dose of The Cure if they had Kate Havnevik as the lead singer. In fact, this highly experimental album sounds as if it was made in Holland, or England, or Iceland (think Bjork people!) rather than deriving from the Canadian music landscape. Pan Pan Medico is an incredibly cohesive album, full of abstract nuances that seems to have defined new-age punk which lives in the likes of Quantum Physics and other expanding ways to think of science and humanity and now music. Hinterland's music is raw and experimental, but lead singer Michaela Galloway`s voices is incredibly ethereal and a complete comparison to Pia in the lingering song `Geometry.`

A song like `Somatoform` (the definition is similar to Munchausen syndrome by proxy) as one example of all the songs on Pan Pan Medico, is great all on its own, with dark humour and reflective commentary on societal stigmatism that makes the track multi-dimensional, abstract, concrete and interesting all at the same time. Yet, when paired with the track after it `The Lepidopterist` (an entomologist who specializes in butterflies and moths) you manage to get a larger picture of a cerebral album that demands its listener to think.

Detwiller Pavilion

300.6

Somatoform

The Lepidopterist

Future Ghost

Magellan (Sail From The Sun)

You Speak < I'm Silent

Constants

Geometry

The First, The Last

Titled

The Sentinel