Your gauzy summer soundtrack has arrived: Pinkunoizu's 'Free Time!'

This Danish band turned up at White Heat last year and I was pretty keen on them immediately, but the album is a glorious thing indeed. Where their live show is all about driving rhythms and Velvets-indebted wig-outs, this debut full-length is... ah, so hard to describe. It just RIPPLES. A beautifully put-together record that should have real staying power in your record collection.

Pinkunoizu 
'Free Time!' 
Full Time Hobby

The debut from Copenhagen-via-Berlin band Pinkunoizu didn't so much arrive on my desk as waft down on a tattered Persian carpet to pour me a thimbleful of intoxicating syrup. Taking the post-rock of their previous incarnation, Le Fiasko, the four Danes douse elliptical grooves with '60s pop tones and hypnotic melodies to create a lo-fi grooviness that fans of Stereolab or Animal Collective would welcome.

Opener 'Time Is Like A Melody' is like seeing a sunrise from underwater, rhythms expanding and contracting like lapping waves, while 'Parabolic Delusions' teams some forgotten tune of the Cultural Revolution with acid squelch and clapping games. Those grooves aren't merely groovy but alluring, sucking you into a fantastical hinterland of vintage psychedelia where Eastern scales and one-chord drone jams mesh with bathroom echo guitars and sweetened melodies.

There's no showing off here though – all is decidedly low-key. Much like 936, Peaking Lights' sleeper hit last year, 'Free Time!' deserves to be the gauzy backdrop to another Indian summer.

Never coming full circle: Pinkunoizu at White Heat

First published in Loud And Quiet 

Pinkunoizu at White Heat, Madame Jojos
20 September 2011

Despite the Japanglish name, Pinkunoizu bring their filigree rhythms and hypnotic movements from the slightly less distant climes of Copenhagen, working with what appears to be a standard issue post-rock vocabulary of drums, guitars, violin and more guitars. But with a mission statement to “never come full circle, to move hazily in bended ellipses”, the five-piece deftly sidestep the earnest bombast of similarly equipped bands in favour of a tightly-balanced propulsion that's taut yet fluid, dense yet ephemeral. Like a bullet train speeding past Mt Fuji, you might say.

You can taste Mogwai in the soft vocals and slowly evolving guitar phrases of quieter tracks, while the spectre of shoegaze is invoked at its most inspired and least dirgy as the set builds louder, faster and tighter. Battling guitars are couched delicately inside the mix rather than squealing for attention over the top, much like Yo La Tengo at their most rasping and rugged (there's even the lesser-spotted female drummer to stretch the comparison) or the Velvet Underground on the viola-versus-guitar jam of 'Hey Mr Rain'. The Peep EP, a more delicate and exotic experience than Pinkunoizu's live show, is out in November on Full Time Hobby.