Valse Noot comes from Brest, the most western city of Brittany
and therefore of France, a city whose contribution to the various rock /
punk / noise scenes during the last decades is far from being negligible.
You may have heard of
Les Collabos
(famous french punk band from the 80s),
Thrashington DC
(great hardcore punk band from the 2000s),
Syndrome 81
or
Litovsk
(two of the leading bands of the current post-punk/oi! scene) or the
current stoner/noise band
Mnemotechnic...
Anyway today we're talking noise rock, first class noise-rock from the
far end of the earth !
Valse Noot's debut release is almost a decade old now
(2012), so yes these guys have been together for a while and I can guess
that, already at the time, it was far from being their first rodeo.
Valse Noot is an "experienced" band so don't let yourself tricked
by their name (Valse Noot means False Note in Dutch), these guys know what
they're doing.
And what they're doing here, on this
3-track but 25-minute-long EP, is definitely closer to stoner or progressive noise rock than
grindcore.
On Run Off The Main the keyboard buzz in the background while the guitar builds melodies close
to what you can find in some modern emo/screamo/post-hardcore songs, the
vocals first accompanie the whole in a rather melodic approach, before
letting itself go to heart-rending, and very screamo, screams.
With tracks that long there is plenty of time to build a really
progressive rise in energy, for instance the 10-minute-long
Young Epic People starts with a folkloric vibe, voices recalling
ancient songs from the Celtic age, before it slowly mutates into a
nightmarish modern screamo/post-hardcore lullaby and, at last, into
something tribal, aggressive, almost metal...
I really like that some of the lyrics on the very
MrBungle-influenced Forbidden Garden are in French, I'm always in favour
of the use of mother tongue anyway. Despite a very "psyche" (The Doors
?) second part that I don't dig, it's probably my favourite track of the
EP.
To be honest that's not the kind of music I listen to at all, and I did not enjoy it so much. It's clearly well done but it sounds way too polished, way too close to metal, way too progressive for me... and I would not have decided to write a few words about the band if it would have been for this kind of stuff only.
Two years and a half later (late 2014), the four Britons self-release
their first full-length, So Straight Architecture. With seven
tracks (including The Forbidden Garden and
Run Off The Main which were on the demo/EP) and a total
duration of over 45 minutes, the band is still not on the
power-violence path (fortunately!) but is on the way of more "compact"
tracks, the longest one being one from the EP.
Well to be honest I'm a bit uncomfortable with this album,
Valse Noot continue their exploration of a modern sound at the
crossroads of genres I can appreciate (in a few words: Noise-Rock and
all its more or less experimental and bouncy offshoots) and others I
have a lot more trouble with (Progressive Metal, Nu Metal... and other
things I won't even try to qualify), which makes for a particularly
uncertain mix. Of course I can't help but be seduced by the killer
start of Out Of My Mouth (until this unfortunate and painful
background guitar part), the very good and heavy basslines of
Be A Better Man, by the heartbreaking screams accompanying the
bouncy My Eyes Will Not Dry, but there are also all those
dispensable synth layers, all those excessively melodic vocal passages
and slightly neo-metal (and cheesy) riffs that quickly irritate
the thin skin of my sensitive eardrums.
And yet, behind it all, I can hear, feel, the scattered members of
what the band will eventually deliver in the finally reconstituted
body of the next album's noise-rock slaughter...
Here we finally reach the main point of interest, Valse Noot's second album, and proper success, Utter Contempt. Released by a bunch of labels (Ideal Crash, Atypeek Music, Vollmer Industries, Super Apes, French Wine and Offoron), this LP is the one everyone was waiting for and was not going to let slip by.
As the drummer explained, the band wanted to make something way more
tensed, more compact, more brutal and straight forward in a noise-rock
kinda way... and that's exactly what they did. Six years have passed
since So Straight Architecture, a lot of Noise-rock and angry
music has been made and the Britons have decided to get to the heart
of it, to cut the crap and distil a core of energy and mastery.
Yes Girl Band, Blacklisters and many others have
happened during the last eight years, and they didn't pass
unnoticed.
Embellished by a neat and sober but sumptuous graphic design (everything is made by David, the guitar player, who is also a successful graphic designer), whose
elegant black and white aestheticism can be found in the clip above,
this 7-track vinyl also marks by the power of its sound. Recorded in
Brest by the bass player of Syndrome 81, the band has all the
sound amplitude necessary to let burst almost 8 years of
rehearsals.
Forget the 9 or 10 minute long tracks, Valse Noot brings it
back to less than 6 minutes, which is more than enough to throw
brilliant explosive Noise-rock to your face. Far from having abandoned their musical identity, the Brestois have extracted the substance of it to better concentrate it in shorter, but deadlier, attacks. The synth continues its background work, smearing with anguished layers the bases of a nervous and uncompromising rhythmic of which Angst is probably the purest example. But more than a band that has found the formula of a recipe that it will cook, re-cook, reheat and re-serve to addicted guests, Valse Noot succeed in delivering an album with a remarkable diversity. Each song is impeccably constructed, chiselled to the chord, the edges are sharp and you're warned, they're built to hurt...
Utter Contempt manages to build itself at the crossroads of the influences of a band that is far from displaying a fetish for the big names of the genre (aka the Chicago scene?) but rather feels always ready to grab from here and there the necessary dough to shape its clinching sound.
My only regret is that they have not finally joined their illustrious compatriots from Pylone, Poutre, Quartier Rouge or Harpon in the screaming-in-French Noise-rock clan... It's a pity as it worked so well on Forbidden Garden.
In any case, Valse Noot has joined the big league, the one in which bands whose records we never tire of listening to, again and again, bark and rumble...
Good job!
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