Zam Zam / La République des Granges / Permafrost / Murailles Music
From the Tesla crackle of the intro to that extending shadow of organ creeping on throughout, the weird melodics here on Rien Virgule‘s La Consolation Des Violettes feed a widening crescent of expectation. A rich invitation that stirs up a Giallo sensibility, akin to Goblin, but with more lurk in the suspense department.
That repetitive and mesmerizing concoction this threesome weld is certainly formidable, that centring vocal, a smoothly subversive focal point staining your consciousness, breathing round your head Catherine Ribeiro-like as vibrating frequencies shark the fluidity.
My schoolboy french is definitely missing out the finer details, but the energy flowing through is superb. Anne Careil’s Souxise-like swagger, knifing those sustained tonals, seductively see-sawing the sorcery. Flickering shapes that breed like wrestled memory, half-lit and spiralling, levitating the space then tangling octopus-like from repeated rafters. A hypnotic foundation sweeping circlular scribbled over, forked then extra-roasted.
Rien Virgule may have tragically lost a band member, but those who remain are scribing a fitting epitaph, a visceral soup of gothic grandiloquence. Taut and teetering, full of igniting discovery and clattering sharpness.The gigantic sound of “Huso Huso” that floors you, its gurgling and electrocuted Stockhausen start hitting out on looped rythmics and hypothermic cymbals, suddenly eating up space like a half-starved animal. Anne’s hex-like incantations pooling its crevices with dark majesty as waves of slippery organ break over an agitated kaleidoscope of cut-up / crumbled / singed cataclysm. The galloping key-lines of “The Cry Of The Typographer”, a subject seldom explored musically, ramping up the drama in a dervish of Carl Orff-like swerves, spurring spontaneity prising open its darkened fruit. “Tambour De Nacre” clinging to a wavering synth outline, drawing you in with gentle operatics and chinking kinetics, then swimming out on spiralised words as the instrumentals tug at your senses in a glossolalia of textural intent, repeated layers rubbing ecstatically dramatically daggering a succulent jigsaw.Loving the way everything feels alive, choreographed in the moment, things spin holographically on repeated pins; the witchy distorted disco of “Toque De Clous” that lights up your head as its squelchy ping-pong is overtaken by a seasickness of wavering phantom and phased apparition, all cut across by colourful spillages and sweeping dramatics. The sheer genius of “L’ogresse Amoureuse”’s poltergeist activity abstracting into a power ballad that’s all wind-whipped chiffon swelling on dioded dashed spikes.
Without doubt La Consolation Des Violettes is a record whose strange flavours will continually to satisfy for years to come — something that lives outside itself, belts across your senses with startling originality. Another jewel in Rien Virgule’s glowing crown.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
