SOCIAL VIOLENCE (vinyl)

Description

Androids are still dreaming of electric sheep... In France, in rock circles, the 2000s garage revival — Strokes, Libertines and other French imitations labeled baby rockers — has often been criticized for being more plastic than militant, for not living up to their packaging, slim black wank-off jeans, in their content. Whatever the creators of these fashion phenomena may think, you don’t make punk rock to impress haute couture runways; if you claim to be an heir to No Future, you need rage or at least some backbone. That’s the case with Fabulous Sheep, who not only master all the codes of post-punk rock, but also openly embrace in English their belief in the need for an indignant youth Internationale. Well, it must be said they come from Béziers, Bob’s town, a French Twin Peaks where they met in high school. As early as 2016, they released a first EP, Kids are Back, followed by a first album in 2019; they’ve played hundreds of concerts, and they’re raw as a pint of Bitter. Then came 2020, a pajama year, spent knitting the amps to flesh out the sound of the basses and saxes, the guitars and the snare hits. That’s also how they caught our eye, with the video for Satellite, released in early October, where T Soulairol, P Berini, C and J Pernet, G Ducellier, confined in bed-prisoner outfits, express their frustration with a 2.0 world now accessible only on screen. Social Violence is the title of this second album, a post-apocalyptic record where, not without humor, the five musicians urge us to react to the numbness of the world, the Blade Runner future. “We fight,” the first screech of these 11 tracks, drives home the point of survival with a deafening drumbeat. Short tracks, two or three minutes as required to respect the genre’s efficiency, with the exception of Mediterranean Cemetery, a condensed text stretched over five minutes of tragic drowning in slow motion. Bodies of migrants gently pushed back onto the beach, “the sea is their cemetery, welcome to the 21st century”... The sheep are electric but also eclectic, because there isn’t just one kind of rock on this record; it’s not only punk, new wave or garage. The choices serve the lyrics, and the nods to the classics pile up, as with the Clash, to serve anarchy, the blasphemous “Believe in god!” RISE UP PEOPLE! How can you believe in God? On Parasite and Dogs, we savor Jim Diamond’s touch (producer of The Whites Stripes and The Sonics), American alternative in all its effectiveness, accompanied by their videos that remind us of the best moments of the offbeat DIY videos of the 90s. For the rest of the record, Arbre E Saldana and Fabulous Sheep offer us an equally polished production, thought out in the studio to better let loose live. Because if there is one message to take from this record, it’s that we’ll have to fight not to become androids!