Confounding confusionists Ni clearly take the long-form approach to album construction. An album every four years is about the score, but with results like this, it is well worth the wait.
The simmering drone that opens Fol Naïs causing a slow build of tension is the only section of the running time that is not high on the volatility meter. Tendrils unfurl slowly until the scattershot kaleidoscope explodes and musical debris is blown far and wide.
The twisted rhythms are hard to follow, as if a rugby scrum was making an escape down a cobbled street while the bass is both flexible and taut somehow. The guitars jab and poke, a pointillist oblivion, whining in your face and dribbling down your lapels as they squeal sour nothings in your ears and ravaged chords abseil from dizzy heights. This feels like music for people who haven’t sat still in twenty years. It doesn’t really follow a pattern for long, and those that they nail down for fifteen seconds are abstruse and complex. It feels like riding a ghost train but at 100 mph, with leering visions goofing at every bend, leaping out and smacking you around the fizzog a few times and then skipping away laughing. The tempos are so convoluted and so much happens in such a short time scale that you can almost feel yourself ageing.A shuddering one-note riff may be electrocuting a series of strafing chords while the percussion pummels regardless, descending briefly into an acid bath of digital scurf; but don’t think it is all close-eyed lunacy. They can cause tension in other ways, slowly and awkwardly with milliseconds of silence bookended by morasses of doom. Whichever way though, nothing is allowed to settle and the drumming is simply superb, lending cohesion where necessary, but then exploding like a rhythm grenade with nobody knowing when the pin was actually pulled so unable to run for cover.
If you looked in the dictionary under relentless and intense, it is likely a snap of these guys may show up; but when you add in part-time vocalist Anthony Béard‘s furious ranting, it ups the ante just a little bit more. Imagine locking David Yow in a box and then letting the band try to dig him out with their instruments; that gives you some idea, but its spare use gives it greater effect. In some tracks, the slow intros give a hint that there might be interests beyond causing epilepsy in the listener, and the cymbal washes and meditative guitar circles of the penultimate track certainly hint even further outside the box as the strangely mediæval figures are let loose in a balloon. The final track is an almost complete volte-face with feedback-edged sludge the order of the day. Crying chords and Earth-y tones finally give drummer Nicolas Bernollin time to make the strikes count, but he still can’t stick to a steady pattern. It eventually slips out with a blissful feedback coda and a chance for the listener / gyrator to rest the torn muscles, restore the aching limbs and maybe bandage the head.At points, Fol Naïs reminded me of the much-missed Sweep The Leg Johnny in its helter-skelter ascent to Nirvana, while I also couldn’t help thinking that maybe the love child of Don Caballero and Melt-Banana might mutate into this; but whatever that may mean, this is an absolute tumult of an album and hugely enjoyable. Long may they reign.
-Mr Olivetti-
