Surprise Barbue – Kabukichō

Zam Zam

The synth duo of Kevin Valentin and Benjamin Moutte have a proper appreciation of their wares, something that the ominous plunge of the opener on their new Surprise Barbue album Kabukichō solidly demonstrates. It mindscapes a lovely tensive herald, spiralised in jewelled splashes and a subtle creep of melody that glitters its periphery. A drama that twists in “Cerf-Souris”’s unfurling keystrokes as a sweetened glaze of fluorescent curls fireflies your head with cinematic frames and tapering shapes.

You get a real sense this duo are jigsawing a reactive whole, playfully musing a chemistry of betweens, with the floaty drift of “Chanson Pour Un Bernard L’Hermite” full of accented mirrors and complimentary shapes that snugly cushion or nourish in deflective fancy. The way the title track “Kabukichō” (named after Tokyo’s red light district) nods nostalgically to early ’80s video games as that noir-nibbled elastic slips into vaporising transits and fracturing azures, staples its simple undulating core in expectant horizons and wavering temperature.

The Blade Runner-esque cover art really fits well with the music as that regal progressive of “Le Triomphe De Neptune” seances the opulent orb of some lo-fi Mozart, its mercurial arpeggios seemingly plucked from Jean-Jacques Beineix’s diva. That icy synthetic of “L’Arche De Noé”’s tight-rope slowly seduced in chorusing melody too, then curiously accelerated in secondary sweeps that hungrily wash over like a Vangelis nosebleed, its inquiring shapes sculpted in glittery euphorics, suddenly grabbing the regal zither of the previous track to elevate them in a glorious array of come-down curves.

A tempered afterglow picked up by the twilighted Elizabethan dance of “Robin Le Délicat” — then silence — skilfully re-animated in this low-slung industrial rasp. A colourful layering that psychedelically falls through your mind in coptering contour and dead piano pins as that cowbell continuum is constantly harassed in roasty Guru Guru grandeur and the kind of album exit that makes anticipation for more all that more pressing.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-