ninehertz

In my head, evidently based on when I first came across Stockholm’s Kungens Män sometime mid Covid period, they’ve been a band on a quick rise, a steady output and a growing force within the more experimental and free end of heavy psych. But now I check, they’ve been around for donkey’s years and somehow I’ve never gone back to delve into a vast trove of a back catalogue going back more than a decade.

For another time though, as they’re back once more, with Resande i rockmusik out on the wonderful Echodelick Records. It translates to the much more prosaic English of “Travelling in Rock Music”, and the four long tracks focus on gentle, rhythmical repetition. There’s a motorik Krautrock beat in its very opening sequence, settling into loose grooves which are rarely wandered from, where the shoegaze mentality allied to metronomic psych turns from uneventful to mesmeric.

You feel tricked into hypnotic states through polite and cunning drones of flowery guitars, playful and simplistic on the surface but with an trance inducing agenda. There’s a slither of a change in approach on third track Respekt för nature with some stoner end psych, faint reminders of the Elektrohasch school, a peaceful eleven minute experience. The final track builds slowly, only just noticeable advancement of momentum, a fun skittishness to it as it develops and adds layers, and then a slightly leftfield, but very specific reminder of the German duo Dÿse, or a psychedelic version of their earlier works at least.

This took it’s time to bed in but made a home once I gave it the requisite patience and space for my understanding to catch up. As I began, I’m overdue a trawl of everything they’ve done, but it’ll have to wait, because with their relentless recording schedule and more pertinently, the quality of Resande i rockmusik, the now and happening times of Kungens Män deserve and require my full attention.