Fräulein - Pedestal

‘Pedestal’ all but reinforces Fräulein’s status as a vital component in the ever-growing landscape of contemporary shoegaze and grunge. Loaded with fearsome menace, devilish seduction and provocative lyrics - “Wrap me up in plastic / My whole body’s here / Ready to be sold,” Joni Samuels elliptically moans in ‘Brand New’ - ‘Pedestal’ offers four succinct packages of alternative rock. They impress most for their immaculate, barebones interplay between Joni’s guitar and the precision drumming of Karsten Van Der Tol which are so inseparably interlocked as to reject any need for extraneous embellishments. Depositing itself less in the quarries of ‘90s nostalgia as predecessor ‘A Small Taste’, while still nonetheless indebted to the power chord fuzzes so tied to that era - the choruses of ‘Big Cool’ and ‘Pet’ are examples of that exact phenomenon - ‘Pedestal’ unequivocally feels like an update, charged with the urgent forces of ‘now’. Recalcitrant, shit-kicking, electric.