Oso Leone - Mokragora

Lets make it about me again. I’ve always felt an almost jingoistic attachment to the Spanish side of my family. As of such, I’ve always sought out decent Spanish bands and where fellow Galicians Los Piratas have produced two of my favourite forward thinking (by Spanish standards) pop-rock albums of all time (Ultrasónica and Relax, go check ‘em out), they’re still a “pop-rock” band like most other Spanish bands. And back to the band we’re here to talk about…

On hearing the first ten seconds of “Ficus” my ears pricked up like a hunting dog . There’s a rare, captivating sparseness at work here. I freeze as it washes over me. The gentle, rising drone of a synth, the breathy bass, the pulse of electronic drums, the gaps between sounds and the meeting point recurring like a meditative heartbeat, then the build that seems to have seized control of that weird part of me that only responds to music as it builds and crashes out again, easy as waves, powerful as the ocean and just as nonchalant.

My first play of Mokragora was accompanied by some weird accidental photo tour on Google Maps, morphing in and out of pictures of the Serbian village with which the album shares its name. A remote pocket of green and grey, a union of retro-futurist village life and ancient surroundings. A strange sense of peace and the suggestion that this place was born on a whim and forgotten just as quickly yet remains as an idyllic microcosm of sorts. Mokragora is just that. A world of its own, a law unto itself. An unassumingly epic scrapbook of sounds and concepts. Hypnotic repetition and patient layering, it swells but never bursts; a slumbering beast of a record, asleep beneath a mountain, stretching beyond the confines anyone might wish to place around it. The union of acoustic and electric drums, of conventional chords and unconventional arrangements. Ideas seemingly blowing in off the breeze and changing the course of a song, always with impeccable restraint and sensitivity. It never begs your attention, just somehow commands it.

I find a lot of record press releases to be vigorously shaken soda cans of hyperbole but when they say that Oso Leone are a “first-of-a-kind in Spain” I have to agree.