BUVEZ LE POISON (vinyl)

Description

Alone for the night, he is the last man. About a third of his posts are to warn that he’s lost his phone, or thought he saw a dog making a sandwich. Paul Ramon (Bryan's Magic Tears, la Secte du Futur) found the time to finish a second album in which the rare mess of the first had time to coagulate. Preceded by a reputation for being Defcon 1 unmanageable while visibly capable of keeping it together, we’re not surprised to find the same level of paradox in "Buvez le poison". If you dig deep into the record, you find the whole musical pharmacopoeia of the last forty years. It cruises at 30 on the highway (Hacienda, dub on the way down with overdone bass) and at 90 in the city (les victimes du roi, medieval-fantasy hallucination with arpeggios). Pleasure Principle decided that the highway code doesn’t apply to its vehicle. French vocals neither shouted nor whispered, guitars sometimes highlife, sometimes Caribbean, 90s synths, MTV moments with studied vulgarity, traces of everything, traces everywhere. Singer by obligation, by his own admission, he gets on with it by chanting his lyrics with the annoying, smug arrogance of the Ludwig Von 88 singer on a third-year internship in Manchester. Glad to be here, but he wouldn’t want it to be known. Acting as if it’s nothing, Paul Ramon stuck out his tongue to write, and he generously strings together one-liners from a total slacker: "if you want to flee the world, elegance is essential", "it’s in denial that I thrive." So many disposable razor blades of NF quality that we can’t wait to see him pull them from his pockets on stage, to cut everyone open (with a bit of trouble, inevitably). In the mix, Marc Portheau turns the trick: thus Héliopolis, a psych-pop jam in a tunnel full of delay, is quietly polished up to add choirs and winds brought in all the better (Olivier Demeaux, Romain Vasset) because they hadn’t been warned they’d be dropping by. A real trapdoor, this album. The punishment begins: prose lyrics, we expect a dungeon atmosphere and foul confessions, but in the end it gets arms waving in the air, trampling the corpse of synth-dumbed-down dance pop, circa 1995. "Frappe le cuir" earns its tribute to the Happy Mondays, which we could have expected given the drummer’s pedigree, but it’s sung in a Négresses Vertes mood. Even "Buvez le poison" and "la sieste", a two-part promo campaign for narcotics — one punchy, one swaying — that deserves an immediate report, contains its antidote for those who know how to listen. And in Rêves, a rather summery chord-driven track, it’s the solo guitar, fucked up to perfection by effects, that comes in to stir things up and gives clues as to how derelict the atmosphere is. So when we land on Plein de rancoeur je vis mon meilleur moment, a successful attempt to redo "Loser" in a less literal way in 2022, we tell ourselves that yes, it’s really endearing-annoying, but Pleasure Principle knows exactly what it’s doing. It’s not a collage, we’re in the realm of non-miscible colors, the kind you spread out to watch them lounge next to each other without ever mixing, while grinning stupidly, the brain properly fucked up as it should be.