This French "power trio" was recorded live at a sleepy little music festival in Basel, Switzerland, and drove the crowd into a negative frenzy with its combination of punk rock viscera and attempted jazz improv dynamics. Jacques Berrocal, Jean Francois Pauvros, and Gilbert Artman are a power trio who not only play guitar, bass, and drums, but also cornet, flutes, gongs, organ, and piano. They make a hell of a lot of racket and probably caused these poor yobs at this little music festival to have a bad afternoon, perhaps even a headache. This is messed-up music, bent, distorted, full of itself. It is chock full of self-consciousness for "how weird it is, man" and also of hatred for everyone who doesn't "get it." It might have been clever if it weren't trying to shock the poor, culturally uneducated bourgeois masses. Given that these guys can only play a few riffs, they have to get the most mileage out of them. On "Khomeiny Twist" they do that with a boatload of feedback, a cheesy synth line and drum loop, and raucous noises too ugly to describe. I had hoped their track called "The End" was an actual cover of
the Doors' tune, because it's 14 minutes long, but it's just more of the same. Imagine
Public Image Ltd. imbued with the musical talent of
the Slits and Normal's sense of humor and you have the idea. This band can't play well at all, they don't know what real improvisation is, but they're funny, so that's worth something. I can't imagine why Hat put this out, not even by their humble standards could they have thought anyone would have purchased this pretentious inept piece of musical stupidity. ~ Thom Jurek