pôt-pot – ‘Warsaw 480km’ album review: Points to an interesting realm but trundles the opposite direction
Psych is a fraught terrain. When pulled off, expert fuzzy Krautrock explorations can yield some of the most heady and thrilling experiences on offer in music’s far-flung dimensions. All too easily, however, such noodling can limp tediously like a never-ending backing track of a wilted falafel canteen.
It’s a gamble Irish quintet pôt-pot are willing to make. Based in Portugal and primarily led by multi-instrumentalist Mark Waldron-Hyden, pôt-pot have been quietly dropping EPs and singles for the last few years of fuzzing motorik expanses and lashing drone, evoking the echoes of everybody from The 13th Floor Elevators’ acid jug wobbles to Faust at their most slitheringly propulsive.
Now dropping their debut album with Felte Records, Warsaw 480km sees Waldron-Hyden reach into their pool of lysergic rock and unearth its beating heat, imbuing pôt-pot’s cosmic stomp with a latent slick of grief wrung from private loss and life’s little habit of completely upending one’s world. Charged with such emotional fervour, Waldron-Hyden corralled his synergised pôt-pot together in the studio to blast full-band, real-deal live sessions for an earthy wander of lysergic edge with a human pulse.
pôt-pot achieves this balance to a degree. There’s an alive, electric crackle that sparks throughout Warsaw 480km, a bouncing resonance of the five members all playing in the room together, which guides an intimacy to the record’s hazy jam. A marriage of disparate sonic characters touches on what makes the psych-garage so intoxicating, too, bristling textures of coarse guitar bubble and fizz against the shimmering swirl of feedback and effects pedals.
Yet, for all the aural promise and emotional pull, Warsaw 480km never quite leaves the confines of Lisbon’s WAAHs Records space. Tantalising teases of a far-out journey never materialise to anywhere overly exciting or profound, the free-form explorations too loose and unshackled for their own good. Unfortunately, pôt-pot hand out the promise of a psychoactive game, but steer Warsaw 480km toward the dreaded falafel canteen after briefly unveiling the vast, chromatic hinterland. As the album passes, a nagging sensation creeps in: “I feel like I’ve been here before?”
Warsaw 480km’s Ace card is its masterful wield of the all-important drone. Whether Mykle Oliver Smith’s guitar abrasion or Elaine Malone’s trancing harmonium, pôt-pot pull themselves from the brink of completely tame and tethered compositions by slathering their pieces with a well-honed aural warble on numbers ‘I AM!’ and ‘Hot Scene’, authentically in reach of krautrock and Nuggets psych’s trippy tradition. Still, such a keen atmosphere weave never wards off the frustrating feeling that Warsaw 480km could have transported away to somewhere infinitely more interesting.
Defining track: ‘I AM!’ – The opening drone alone penetrates a hypnotic spot in the brain that lulls one into a psychedelic stupor.
For fans of: Hosting a screening of El Topo but forgetting the acid.
A concluding comment from The Mole: “Where are you going!? I’m over here!”
Release date: September 19th, 2025 | Producer: pôt-pot | Label: Felte Records
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