Los Fancy Free

by Dan Worth

Enigmatic Mexican rockers will get under your skin

"There's a je ne sais quoi that might mean you find yourself returning for repeated listens, even if you’re not entirely sure why."

To call Los Fancy Free an enigma is an understatement. They’ve been around for many a year and released several albums yet they have no Wikipedia entry, but the lead singer, Martin Thulin does – surely a sign you’ve made it? Lead singer Thulin is also known as Menonita Rock and was born into a Scandinavian community called Nueva Escandinavia in Northern Mexico – how on earth did a Scandinavian community come to be in Mexico? Wikipedia had no answers.

Their music is then, perhaps unsurprisingly, something of an enigma too. Their latest release Nevergreens Vol.1 is a blend of many styles and certainly sounds as if it has come out of a strange part of South America. Thulin admits to being influenced by everything from punk to David Bowie and Depeche Mode and from the music you know he’s not pointlessly name-dropping.

But leave any preconceived ideas of genre labels at the proverbial door. To neatly categorise them within words such as ‘psychedelic’ or ‘rock’ is neither fair or accurate. Listen to the opening track of the new album, ‘The Naïve Heat’, and you can hear why. The same is true of album closer ‘High Society’. It’s a great track yet neither a good representation of their sound at large nor an easily definable piece of music anyway.

Nevergreens Vol.2 is set to feature a 10 minute version of Dire Straits’ ‘Sultan’s Of Swing’ – on first glance that sounds like it must be some mindless indulgence with overly long guitar solos but given the sounds covered on Nevergreens Vol.1 it’s fair to assume it could well be fantastic. Time will tell.

With many bands a quick listen immediately leads to "Oh they sound like X" or "They’re clearly influenced by Y", but with Los Fancy Free this is almost impossible. Whether or not you like it is a matter of taste but you’d be hard pressed to deny its innovation and it has a je ne sais quoi that might mean you find yourself returning for repeated listens, even if you’re not entirely sure why.

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