Pas Pire Pop, I Love You So Much (LP)

Psychedelic rock, krautrock, desert rock, punk rock, noise rock, afrobeat, experimental pop, post-rock, electronic; all are touchstones for Avec le soleil sortant de sa bouche. Their multi-movement durational music arguably combines trance rock and audio collage above all - a diced and spliced approach to longform multi-movement groove music played by a stripped down quartet of two guitars, bass and drums, synched to pre-recorded electronics and musique concrète. The band's unique restlessness and inventiveness seduces with shifts, turns and dovetails, bubbling forth with ideas and consistently destabilizing its own inexorable musical logic in highly satisfying fashion. Above all, their sound always seems to be escaping overt homage or retro tendencies; neither freighted with reverence nor weightless with irreverence, the music of Avec le soleil routes and uproots itself along its own refreshingly untrodden path.

Pas pire pop, I Love You So Much picks up where the band's 2014 debut Zubberdust! left off. Quite literally: the needle drops on "Trans-pop express" with Avec le soleil in full swing, playing a musical theme that had been submerged at the end of Zubberdust's closing track, now developed in the full kaleidoscopic light of day. Unfurling over 10 minutes of sinuous bass, chiming guitars and wordless vocals, "Trans-pop express" becomes increasingly interwoven with fizzing and squelching electronics, breaks into an extended and more insistent motorik/post-punk 'chorus' of sorts, then returns full-circle to a resplendently buzzing and whirring reprise of the initial groove. "Alizé et Margaret D…" opens with naive melody lines played on dry staccato guitars, peppered with ragged vocal calls, before transitioning through some unison riffing into one of the band's signatures: clean, methodical, exuberantly layered grooves perhaps most reminiscent of Remain In Light (and The Name Of This Band Is)-era Talking Heads. Nothing the band has recorded to date quite drives home the fascinating sonic identity they've forged from their overflowing toolbox of techniques and influences more than "Tourner incessamment dans l'éclatement euphorique…", the 20-minute tour de force that comprises Side Two of Pas pire pop.

Avec le soleil sortant de sa bouche deploys a panoply of buoyant musical ideas, subtly sumptuous sonic treatments, and joyous stylistic nods - while remaining fundamentally devoted to working the groove, from however many angles.