BUVEZ LE POISON

Description

Alone for the night, he is the last man. About a third of his posts are to announce that he has 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 chaos of the first has had time to coagulate. Preceded by a reputation for being unmanageable at Defcon 1 while clearly being able to hold it together, it’s no surprise to find the same level of paradox in "Buvez le poison." - - If you dig deep into the record, you find the entire musical pharmacopoeia of the last forty years. It rolls at 30 on the highway (Hacienda, descending dub with abused bass) and at 90 in the city (the king's victims, fantasy-medieval arpeggiated hallucinations). Pleasure Principle has decided that the rules of the road do not apply to its vehicle. Singing in French neither shouted nor whispered, guitars sometimes highlife, sometimes Caribbean, 90s synths, MTV moments with studied vulgarity, traces of everything, traces everywhere. - - A singer by obligation, by his own admission, he performs by chanting his lyrics with the smugness of the singer from Ludwig Von 88 in a 9th-grade stage in Manchester. Happy to be there, but he wouldn’t want anyone to know. Acting nonchalant, Paul Ramon has stuck out his tongue to write, and he generously strings together one-liners of a slacker: "if you want to flee the world, elegance is in order," "it’s in denial that I thrive." So many disposable razors of quality NF that we can’t wait to see him pull out of his pockets on stage, to bleed everyone (while struggling a bit, of course). - - In the mix, Marc Portheau transforms the attempt: thus Héliopolis, a psych-pop jam in a tunnel full of delay, is subtly enhanced with better-placed choirs and winds (Olivier Demeaux, Romain Vasset) who hadn’t warned they would be stopping by. - - A real trap, this album. The punishment begins: prose text, we expect a dungeon atmosphere and fetid confessions, but ultimately it gets arms waving in the air, trampling the corpse of brainless synth dance pop, circa 1995. "Frappe le cuir" pays its tribute to the Happy Mondays, which we could have expected given the drummer's pedigree, but it’s sung in a Négresses Vertes vibe. - - Even "Buvez le poison" and "la sieste," a two-part promotional campaign for drugs - one that slaps and one that sways - which deserves an immediate report, contains its antidote for those who know how to listen. And in Rêves, a rather summery piece with chords, it’s the solo guitar, wonderfully messed up by effects, that stirs things up and gives hints of the degree of dereliction of the climate. - - So when we come across Plein de rancoeur je vis mon meilleur moment, a successful attempt to redo "Loser" in a less literal way in 2022, we think that really, it’s endearing, but Pleasure Principle knows exactly what it’s doing. It’s not a collage; we are in the realm of non-miscible colors, the kind we spread out to watch them languidly coexist without ever mixing, smiling stupidly, the brain nicely messed up just right.