
Tongues Of Fire – Room
Genre: Indie Rock, Garage Rock, Alternative Rock
Ideally, every song by a rock band should sound like the last tune of the night before a moment of reckless passion makes them destroy all their instruments and leave the stage without saying goodbye. Not all groups can produce such anarchic beauty. If not, we, the audience, love to be tricked.
See, the thing is that, unless you’re John Lennon or Frank Zappa presenting a two-hour work where every note was carefully and purposefully placed, the beginning and middle of the concert are merely excuses to get people to come down, spend a few quid, and dance in front of the stage for a couple of hours.
Tongues Of Fire’s Room sounds now just like the last song of the night, but the last song they might play in a movie dedicated to the group’s existence. It’s a kind of dance-rock, sure, but it is played as if being covered by Motorhead. The vocals are shouted, the bass is booming and the strobe lights attempt to create seizures out on the dance floor.
Versari – Brûle
We are fortunate to have so many styles of rock music nowadays from which to choose. With so much variety, why then are certain rock musicians embraced by the world, while others are viewed as simply a bit of fun to have while sipping lager?
Partly, I believe, it’s due to the way that the musicians choose to present themselves and what they tell the world about their work. COUM Transmissions, before being labelled by members of the British parliament to be Wreckers of civilization, used to receive grants for their work, provided they called them “art installations” not “rock experimentation“.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were quickly embraced by the art world, especially by literary circles, because they presented themselves as serious writers who happen to make music.
French three-piece Versari sound like a group of serious-minded musicians. In the same way that their predecessors weren’t exactly rock n’ rollers, but artists who happened to use the medium of rock, so too does the group create works for those on the lookout for music that could be played at an art exhibition, or soundtrack the reading of a dense, complex novel.
There’s also an air of provocation about their work. There’s something classy about Brûle, like a well-read gentleman speaking about the devil as someone they tend to have over for Sunday tea.