psychedelic rock
Jockoid Tales is an album by French blues rock/ psychedelic rock group Hold Station. Very concise, with a little less than half an hour in length, the record has five tracks: Take a Ticket, Lucy, The Wheel of Time, Spirits and The Tale. Following in a formidable context the traditional principles of the genre, Hold Station’s sound is deeply indebted to sixties psychedelic rock, like most contemporary groups. Nevertheless, their style is competent, serene, thoroughly dynamic, artistically beautiful, amicable and disdainfully tempestuous to a certain degree. While there is anything too extraordinary about the record, Jockoid Tales proves itself to be an elegant and vivacious work, that lives at the height of a traditional and primordially effective sonorous layout.
The rhythms of the songs in general are thoroughly exciting and groundbreaking, and one thing Hold Station manages to do very easily is to transport their audience to the past, to the times where the flower power, the hippies and the Grateful Dead where at the epicenter of all the major events. But it would be a huge mistake to reduce Hold Station to just another sixties nostalgia resounding group of the underground scene. They have flavor, enthusiasm and, above all, a fragrant sonorous and visual authenticity, that rereads in a major context the beauty, the legacy, the sensibilities and the creative possibilities of the genre. And they do this pretty well, with a brilliantly extravagant style for such a concise album.
With interesting qualities, and a subtle precision of harmonies, Jockoid Tales, while can’t be qualified exactly as a great album, certainly can be defined as an interesting work. With a peculiar sonorous identity, that inserts a modern atmosphere into the music in a subtle and cautious context, while preserving the golden, prosperous and youthfully recognizable vintage qualities of the music, Hold Station certainly can be categorized as an intriguing, exceedingly talented, and, to a modest degree, audacious act of contemporary psychedelic rock, that not only profoundly honors the genre, but also has potential to aggregate new elements, without disrupting it.
Don’t get me wrong, Jockoid Tales is not a masterpiece, but it’s a greatly attractive and beautiful album, with very eccentric, unpretentious and intriguing qualities. With vivacious harmonies, and a delicately groove energy that spreads discreetly throughout the colorful waves of the sound, Hold Station certainly highlights itself as one of the outstanding promising acts of the genre in the contemporary underground scene.
Wagner
The rhythms of the songs in general are thoroughly exciting and groundbreaking, and one thing Hold Station manages to do very easily is to transport their audience to the past, to the times where the flower power, the hippies and the Grateful Dead where at the epicenter of all the major events. But it would be a huge mistake to reduce Hold Station to just another sixties nostalgia resounding group of the underground scene. They have flavor, enthusiasm and, above all, a fragrant sonorous and visual authenticity, that rereads in a major context the beauty, the legacy, the sensibilities and the creative possibilities of the genre. And they do this pretty well, with a brilliantly extravagant style for such a concise album.
With interesting qualities, and a subtle precision of harmonies, Jockoid Tales, while can’t be qualified exactly as a great album, certainly can be defined as an interesting work. With a peculiar sonorous identity, that inserts a modern atmosphere into the music in a subtle and cautious context, while preserving the golden, prosperous and youthfully recognizable vintage qualities of the music, Hold Station certainly can be categorized as an intriguing, exceedingly talented, and, to a modest degree, audacious act of contemporary psychedelic rock, that not only profoundly honors the genre, but also has potential to aggregate new elements, without disrupting it.
Don’t get me wrong, Jockoid Tales is not a masterpiece, but it’s a greatly attractive and beautiful album, with very eccentric, unpretentious and intriguing qualities. With vivacious harmonies, and a delicately groove energy that spreads discreetly throughout the colorful waves of the sound, Hold Station certainly highlights itself as one of the outstanding promising acts of the genre in the contemporary underground scene.
Wagner
