Reviews
“Seattle-based Pampa craft a mix of down-tempo guitar pop, dusty 1970s-vintage-tinged indie folk rock, and neo psychedelia dosed heavily with Latino influences, all of it finished with a layer of gray PNW moodiness. Buenos Aires native singer-songwriter-guitarist Moon Baillie helms the quartet, and his bilingual lyrics on new sophomore full-length La Contumacia are often abstract and delivered in poetic streams-of-consciousness, reflecting on the sun, the moon, sky, sand, love, the idea of home, the passage of time, open land and wilderness versus the city, existence.”
“It’s a mighty good “salad”—PAMPA, which first formed in 2013, seamlessly combines Seattle’s low-fi melancholy with the ’70s rock storytelling of Neil Young and the exuberance and bilingualism of Latin music..”
“....Over the last few years, Pampa has played stages and festivals across Seattle, earning veteran status despite having no recorded material. Now the quintet introduces "In the Flatlands" their debut LP, a mesmerizing mix of elegantly entwined guitars, dramatically unfolding compositions and Moon Baillie's poignant vocals, sung in English and Spanish. "In the Flatlands" picks up the tradition of moody Northwest angst and embellishes it with Moon Baillie's well-traveled, world-weary perspective. These 9 songs are simultaneously classic and of-the-moment, beautiful and stormy, presenting time-tested rock n roll through a fresh, expansive perspective”
-Jonathan Zwickel-SEATTLE WEEKLY
“The beauty of a flatland isn’t in the immediate surroundings- it lies not in the plain itself, but in the unique synoptic perspective of being totally encompassed in horizon. Moon Baillie gets it- he has traveled far and takes it all in. “I’m only an uncanny American,” he says, between sips of coffee. That sense of familiar, but not quite- it’s bristling in his music. After settling in Seattle, his band Pampa began to write music between the horizons. English, Spanish, time signatures? Nothing is required because the present isn’t the point- it’s where they’ve been and where they’re going that matters. The confines of genre and place hinder the story that’s being told. Low-fi Americana latin psychedelic folk indie rock pop. Whatever. “It’s more about an exploration- who am I? Where do I belong?” Those horizons give Baillie and his bandmates freedom to move around. “You don’t see the horizon in Seattle, the music gives me perspective,” says Baillie who named his band Pampa after the grasslands of his home country Argentina. Their new eponymous record serves as a re-orientation in disorienting times. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen but that doesn’t stop us from playing with joy” says Baillie, thumbing through a tattered copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Exuberance is teeming on songs like “A BEAUTIFUL MESS”” and “AMARILLO PANDEMONIO” Joy as defiance, the search as orientation, the future as the now- lucid contradictions to a stranger in a strange land. Pampa is on the threshold of something. The threshold is the point. “
-Calder Thorne, editor of Oblique Harmonies