Scene and Heard – CCCLIX: Typical Critical –  Fufanu –  (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

It’s nice to know that in this fast paced, over-driven, fashion conscious and largely conformist world we find ourselves in, there are still wonderful oases filled with calm and, more importantly brave creativity. Fufanu are custodians of such sheltered places and Typical Critical is a wonderful respite from the charging and single-minded, fast buck world that careers around them.

For a start it’s a song where almost nothing happens, which might seem like a detriment but if you chose just the right slices of nothing to balance the critical emptiness, then you can, rather than fill spaces, merely frame them. In doing so they build atmosphere, anticipation, restraint and a strange futuristic beauty. Their brand of near emptiness is not merely a lack of sonics, rather it is the gentle use of sound to shape the underlying beauty of the natural world, something sensed rather than heard and something more often that not buried under a band’s music in their rush to prove that they can offer something better than the timeless grace of a universe as old as time itself. Music that breathes in time with the world…cool!