Cochonne is a quartet hailing from Durham, North Carolina, which
existed between 2019 and late 2020 or early 2021 something like
that.
For the (unlucky) non French speakers Cochonne originally means
female pig but is mostly used as a slightly gross, but not really
offensive word to describe a sexually dirty girl (the kind of word used in
porn you know).
You're welcome.
I don't know much about the members of Cochonne except that
Mimi Luse (the bassist and vocalist) speaks French and recently
released a solo album under the name
Permanent.
First self-released and then out on Sorry State,
Cochonne's debut tape burst into the world in late 2019.
I did not pay much attention to this tape at the time (I don't know why
really) but I'm glad I got back to it now, it's a very good piece of
post-punk with solid female vocals which recalls many great bands from
different eras as I will be pleased to detail in the coming paragraphs
(yes ma'am).
Cochonne plays some kind of sleek mid-tempo songs with really
upfront female vocals (Mimi's high pitched voice and perfectly
mastered singing technique is impressive), upfront jerky drumming and minimal
guitar and synth layers. The whole thing gives a very strong (and
charming) teenager punk band atmosphere (in the sense of clumsiness and
"honest" naïvety of a young persons' band) to a tape that is not nearly as
flimsy as this sentence might suggest.
I said post-punk but I hear as much early Pylon as early classic
US punk (X and Avengers in a track like Body Bag for
example) as European
punk
(The Slits, The Raincoats and Las VulpeSS but most of all
Kleenex/Liliput in tracks like Omega and
Horror-Scope) and anarcho punk (a bit of Crass and Lost Cherrees in the
vocals maybe?) in Cochonne's six tracks (ok I could add a bit of no
wave here and there with the
Scissor Girls
for example). But as I'm into heavy name-dropping let's get into more
recent ones: ok I can think of
Autor
from Vienna, of some
Spam Risk
tracks and, of course, of
NOTS
and
Table Sugar.... ok ok I stop here it's way more than enough I know but names and
references just keep popping up in my mind when I listen to
Cochonne, what can I do?
After hours of trying to figure out what
Mensonge Humain (Human Lie), sung in French,
reminded me of (except for a discrete
Lucrate Milk
influence in some parts), I finally remembered the Maraudeur (from
Leipzig) track called
C'est Caché
and yes yes there's some common ground here. I still feel like something
else's gonna pop up from the back of my mind any time soon... well anyway
let's move on!
I have to mention the very surprising (and very good) F21 which
starts like a beautiful "punk ballad" where Mimi can let burst all
her vocal knowledge in what could sound at times like a tribute to
Darby Crash by
Quix*o*tic. Fun fact, the track
"comes back to life" after six minutes of silence after its end for a good old
hidden track (damn it's been a while) full of heavy bass lines, offbeat
discussions and high pitched humming... a kind of modern and deviant
Cramps song ?
Let's make it short, I love Cochonne's minimalist post punk: It
is good!
I still can't understand how I missed it two years ago, this is absolutely
brilliant.
After a little change of line-up (the drummer) and for their first
vinyl but final release (RIP female pig), Cochonne is back on
Sorry State with a 5-track 12" called Emergency and a deeply
disturbing cover artwork made by
Jack Thegen-Crowley.
And the atmosphere has changed quite a bit (influence of the new
drummer?), the rhythms are more frantic, the vocals are more "dazzling",
more all over the place in a kind of "arty punk" way if you know what I
mean, making Cochonne's new materials probably even closer to what Nots has been doing for years than the "old" one.
It starts with Qu'est-ce que t'as fait? (What have you done?) and
Asking For A Friend, two perfect arty/no-wave songs in the pure
spirit of bands like
Lucrate Milk
(for the 80s French version) or, more recently,
Preening
for the US version (even if there is no saxophone yes I know). Then comes
KGB, probably the weakest song of the record in my opinion, which
lacks of something to be really striking. But then there is
Trop (Too Much), my favorite Emergency track where
Mimi loses her mind, falls into some kind of delirium where she
repeats in loop, like a mantra, that "it amuses her" or that "she enjoys
it" (ça m'amuse) like a little brat playing with a dead cat or
something like that. Unfortunately the song comes back for a "second
round", avoidable and a bit painful, whereas the end was obvious after two
and a half rather pleasant minutes.
And the band concludes Emergency (and their recording career as it seems) with Vampire, which 3D animation video clip is right above this line. Although I find this kind of 3D animation particularly ugly, the video is rather amusing although it doesn't fit the music at all in terms of rhythm. The song is not bad but not great either, a bit like the whole record in the end in my opinion.
Yes to be honest I'm not as enthusiast about this record as I am about the tape, once again the whole thing is not bad but it does not sound like something I will enjoy going back to regularly, it lacks consistency between the tracks and I'm not really hooked.
But don't listen to me, listen to Cochonne.
N,J'Oi!
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