Album Review: Fabels - Zimmer

31 May 2013 | 10:46 am | Justine Keating

Save for these lesser moments when the conviction begins to falter, Fabels have created something beautifully otherworldly.

According to their Facebook description, Fabels' music comprises “moments captured while travelling at the speed of light through past and future”. There's nothing hyperbolic about this statement; their debut album Zimmer is an amalgamation of wonderfully odd sounds swirling together to create fluidly dynamic pieces of music. The outfit is nothing more than a vocal-sharing duo, respectively playing bass and guitar (occasionally keys and a drum machine) and fusing their sounds together with a loop pedal. There's nothing simple about this formula, and there's nothing small about this Sydney two-piece; Zimmer blends dream pop, post-rock, shoegaze and krautrock in one incredibly surreal package.

The androgynous vocals of Hiske Weijers sound eerily similar to that of Sigur Rós' frontman Jónsi Birgisson. Coincidentally enough, the Dutch lyrics sung in the album's opening track Nek are very near mistakable for Volenskia (otherwise known as Hopelandic; the non-linear language used in Sigur Rós' music). It isn't until somewhere around the two-minute mark that Fabels stop sounding like Sigur Rós and start to sound like Fabels – with their uniquely integrated looping and fractured sounds piecing together something that is distinctly theirs. That glimmer of personality is then followed through, with Semaphore drawing all the glitchier elements of the previous track and moulding it into a carefully electronic (yet inexplicably organic) crescendo. This obscurely natural electronica becomes further explored in Clothesline – a track that would be quite cheesy were it not for the integrity of the sounds.

There is a distinct underlying strength throughout Zimmer, though it isn't entirely consistent. Save for these lesser moments when the conviction begins to falter, Fabels have created something beautifully otherworldly.