Ferries do not deal in certainties. At present, the project is anonymous, electing not to reveal their identities, or any personal information, nor do they play live. The band’s former label Bergpolder liken them to “quickly vanishing” ghosts, their default mode to “exist without existing”. Even Ferries’ album titles, Eye Flutter (2025) and now Eye Wander, evoke a middle ground between earthliness and detachment, stasis and motion, that feels uncanny: a perfect analogue to the type of music they make.
I’m beguiled and conflicted by the group’s second album. Eye Wander spends its runtime drifting in and out of consciousness. Prickly basslines, squealing guitars, and high pitched vocals grow legs of their own, sauntering into strange new territory on longer tracks.
But what is striking about Eye Wander, no matter how much I listen to it, is the record’s likeness in sound to Damo Suzuki-era Can. This results in a project that threatens to teeter towards banal nostalgia rather than originality. At best (which is most of the time), the pendulum swings towards the latter. At worst, things can get a little pastiche-y.
‘All At Once Again’, the album’s second track opens with lone vocal chops, before drums crash into earshot, their dry sound and repetitive style no doubt pulled from the Jaki Liebezeit playbook. A bassline that oscillates octaves across multiple strings grounds the rhythm, while a high keyboard line bobs around somewhere in the mix. When the jam reaches its most intense, the interjection of heavily modified, near funky guitar stabs, combined with the sleekit bass and motorik drums, create a neat simulacrum of Can.
The band rarely slip into parody save these shorter – dare I say, filler – tracks. The moments where it feels like they aren’t channelling their forebears so directly and engaging in broader musical conversation is when things start to get interesting. This is chiefly done through drawing upon dub music, an influence which pervades the record. Listen out for the liberal use of tape delay across the entire project, or the stuttered, hard pan vocal chops that back-end ‘I Swear I Left It Right There’. Similarly, the way in which tracks like ‘Knightville Brawl’ seem to degrade in fidelity as they go on, points to dub. It’s an effect which replicates the way original dub mixes cut to tape would wear down with every use.
Drawing on sounds from a bygone genre or epoch is one of those deceptively tricky things to get right as a musician. It involves an element of looking back, abstracting a sound’s symbolic power, in some ways similar to the art of translating a book from one language to another.
What Ferries forfeit in orthodoxy sometimes they make up for in the inventiveness of their genre hybridity, which lets me overlook some moments of clear magpie-ing. Their music highlights the fascinating connections between krautrock and dub that quickly become evident through listening and research but are rarely realised. Dub and krautrock themselves share a similar sentiment: both styles are about artists dealing with fraught landscapes through ruination, deconstruction, and construction. From: https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/album-of-the-week/ferries-eye-wander-review/
