
Larmes Noires – Vertigo
Similar artists: Slowdive, Placebo, IAMX
Genre: Shoegaze, Post Rock, Alternative Rock
Rock musicians are just acting as news reporters when writing and performing their songs. But many of them, sadly, don’t have many good stories to tell. Most of them don’t even know where to look. There’s a minority, however, that recognizes how the best ideas must always be found there where it is most dangerous to look.
Larmes Noires present their nocturnal rock as connoisseurs of the city streets that your parents warned you against travelling to. This is music that belongs to a long-running tradition of dark, romantic rock n’ roll. These are stories of heartbreaks and bad mistakes that are as frequent as a Parisian traffic jam and as seedy as Boulevard de Montparnasse.
Larmes Noires’ “Vertigo” isn’t so much a grooving rock song as a desolate murmur created using rock instruments. Still, despite its welcoming of the dark, it is also an extremely inviting song, one that seems to carry with it ancient secrets and the promise of revealing some of them. There’s a charming goth-tinged romance at the heart of it all and a sound that predicts numerous terrible disasters.
Donzii – Penetrate
Similar artists: Geneva Jacuzzi, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Cramps, Drab Majesty, Siouxsie and the Banshees
Genre: Post-Punk, Gothic, Dark Wave, Alternative Rock
The more I learn about the world, the less I care for it. The world’s a frightening place, and everyone who constructs a musical scene is determined to make their private creation just as intimidating as the rest of the universe. The Norwegian kids burned down churches, the punk kids threatened to take down the monarchy and the witch house kids pumped ecstasy into their eyeballs while praising the devil.
Not it’s Donzii’s time to terrify. But pure frights are not enough. Each music scene must promise something more alluring than the boredom of everyday life, of squares stuck in a 9 to 5, of normies who simply don’t understand how the world changes. These are pretty radical strategies, but they worked just fine for radical political parties just fine.
Donzii’s “Penetrate” makes an instant, dance-inducing impression. It’s a tune meant to be both sexy and threatening. It makes sex sound about as alluring as making love to a cheese grater. But it is designed to draw a reaction, to get the band noticed, and to make you want to compare them to grizzly punk and dance fame monsters of old. And, in that, they Donzii succeeds.