Le Club des Chats - 'Yes Madame!' (S-S)

How do you like your quirk?  Thick and with a French accent?  Le Club des Chats dropped this single about four years ago and you'd think it was the reincarnation of Family Fodder.  French kids in their bedroom, I guess, but everyone is making music in their bedrooms these days.  The artwork has housecats shooting laserbeams out of their eyes, and the band name is pretty fucking stupid as well.  You gotta love this approach.  You also gotta love seven songs at 45 rpm; it's not a hardcore record, but it is ferocious, exploding out of the vinyl with 'Master of Toadstool' - though the title is misleading cause this isn't slow mushroom music in the slightest.  The drums are the name of the game, frantically bashing through every song and drowning out the other instruments except for the manic male-female voices that shout over every song.  'Ring-a-Ding' is little more than that phrase repeated over a catchy drum cacophony, but it conjures Renaldo and the Loaf at their most punk rock tendencies.  It's ridiculous and young and strange and great.

Cheveu/Crash Normal split 7" (Rococo)

Crash Normal's side erupts with a blast of manic, industrial punk, with careful attention paid to get a sharp, metallic guitar tone. But barely a minute in, we hear the sound of a stylus streaking across a record and the music changes into something much more Cheveu-like. By which I mean, synth drums, and distorted, mostly spoken vocals. So which band are we actually listening to? The third song on the side also confuses me - both of these are slower and almost a bit loungier than Cheveu usually sound. But both bands are from France and probably have some member overlap. The end of (what I think is) the Crash Normal side descends into a collapsing mess -- well, a 'crash', I guess -- which could pass for Nihilist Spasm Band on a good day. The Cheveu side (we're pretty sure of that, as there's a certain twang to the vocalist that we've come to recognise by now) has a howdown feel, with a twangy riff accelerating, smashing into a brick wall, backing up, and doing it again over and over. The vocals are more like barks and it's hard to imagine all of this energy coming from a line-in recording aesthetic. The guitar is clean here and I like the way it rises above the tide. There's great things afoot in France now, as the legacy of Metal Urbain lives on.