The latest album from Anthony Lagerre and Jean Michel Pires, trading as Club Cactus, finds them consolidating on their uncompromising vision of disparate interactions between voice and instrument.
Although only coming in at a little under half an hour, their third album conjoins numerous guest vocalists from all around the world with generally rhythmic but extraordinarily varied musical soundscapes to produce a journey that never lets up.
The album opens with an underground industrial statement of intent; all blustering, blundering rhythm and dirty, distorted sounds while a jaded and matter-of-fact Portuguese singer attempts to bestir the status quo. There is a bluff-sounding continuity to the tones, but the disparate voices are what engages the listener from the panicky Arabic intonation of “Ya Lil, Ya Sbleen”, with its jittery rhythm and sense of frustration, to the distorted guitar and distant angelic voices of “Politics”, a lost loop appearing and disappearing in the sonic mælstrom.
There are elements of the album that had me thinking of what it would sound like if somebody tried to refract PIL‘s Flowers Of Romance through a funhouse mirror; there are the awkward, insistent yet oddly minimalist rhythms adhering to a constant flourish of fresh voices. At times the rhythms are like machinery and “Lass Mich Bei Dir Sein” comes across like Nico rising from an infernal mineshaft, its hellish vision the opposing image to “Tomaneh”‘s repeated mantric phrases and hesitant, carefully shielded drums.
Male voices croon on “Anada” something about “emptying the pool” that circle the lost and disconnected drums, while another loop bridges the storm in “She Dead”, with words breaking free and running for cover. There is absolutely no way to work out what is coming next, with the final piece “Crie(s)” perhaps the icing on the underground cake as primal screams alter the rhythmic peculiarities to provoke something album-ending, the hard but measured sound allowing the voice a sense of freedom that carries the listener away.
Although the short but perfectly formed 3 is the brainchild of Anthony and Jean Michel, it would be nothing without the brave and inspired vocalists who raise the ante with each successive track making a well recommended tour de force.
-Mr Olivetti-
