DROMONIA

Description

"What is the purpose of a record? To revive the feeling. To remember the scent of the concert. To convince someone else to go with us. To help musicians ruin their health to restore ours. But above all, when this record complements a concert: to be able to extrapolate. With the memory of the counter-shot of each scene. A record contains all of this; you just have to unfold it. 'Dromonia', the second album after 'Grave', is one of those little papers folded insistently until they become as hard as wood, the ones on which we’ve written important things. The great deaths, the small confessions, the big mistakes. - - Bracco, on stage, is Loren, who keeps himself busy, drumsticks in hand, in front of an assortment of machines and synths. And it’s Baptiste, guitar around his neck, who sings with the rare conviction of those who shove the microphone into their mouth to make the words come out better. Having strained his retina on VHS tapes of The Cramps must help. His garage background (Los VV's) informs the raw and precise guitar playing. Baptiste manages the verticality, Loren the space and horizontals: it builds solidly even if it’s technical schlag, screwdrivers and pallet wood, you can feel they aim high. - - Bracco has smooth, moist skin; the labels don’t stick too well on it, no matter what we try. That doesn’t stop them from letting their music be visited by discreet ghosts of the dark wave blended family. They love Psychic TV, DAF, Suicide, and Throbbing Gristle, and you can hear it. Music veterans will note that Bracco, a good child of his terrible era, has that warm-cold synth sound from pivotal periods where everything is a minefield (the day we heard a guitar embed itself in techno, the moment punks learned a fourth chord, the night the Happy Mondays decided to hand maracas to Bez: that path is paved with courageous records). 'Sunshine' and 'Secretly Dancing' are good examples of this stateless crossover where the treatment of the guitar/drums duo is particularly successful. - - The clinical and effective mix by producer Marc Portheau encourages playing the record louder than the current crappy atmosphere. Lauriane, a transfuge from Bryan's Magic Tears' shoegazers, has joined them for a vocal feature. 'Cobra Music', the first single, which we had already heard live, is the prototype of those marathon tracks built to be played until exhaustion; we hope you’ll be there at the finish. - - Halory Goerger"