Dinner with Daisy Records, released 14/02/2010

I’m not quite sure where genre-bending ends and full blown musical schizophrenia begins.  It may be somewhere around thoroughly arty male/female fronted outfit French for Cartridge (don’t ask).  With a PhD and a mandate to create “atonal pop music”, Catherine Kontz and Henri Vaxby come from Europe (Luxembourg and Scandinavia respectively) to blow our minds.

It’s not just the variation track by track, it’s the very sudden stylistic changes mid-track.  There’s cutesy sing-a-long (“Loosening the Structures”, “Picture Negative”), experiments in moody chanting (“A Hundred and One”) and some music hall sounding stuff (“Sitting and Reading”).  But everything else is uncategorisable (a word is born), which is not necessarily a bad thing.  The sudden tempo changes and almost bi-polar mood swings evidenced in “TV Dinner”, zapping from down trodden unhappiness to sickly sweet upbeat, is the epitome of the “can you see what we’re doing here” post-modern pop they are going for.

Many have tried to put form and its subversion over content and feeling.  Others have done it better.  Such an idea would have blown our minds 40 years ago, not now.  But the honesty of what they’re doing has a certain attraction.  They are clearly not trying to sell records, with one beady eye on the market, and this gives at least a mild feeling of depth and soul to what they put on record.  Closer “Silhouettes” demonstrates they do have a bit of warmth amongst all this theory.  I respect their attempts to say something different, I’m just not that interested in what they have to say.

Posted In Album Reviews, Feb 28 2010. Words - Martin