If Paris is the new London, and humour me here for a minute, then Montpellier is quite possibly the new Brighton. Which would make these tortuously monikered local heroes the equivalent of, um, say Freakpower. But without Norman Cook. Or something.
+Rintgirtse; take their name from a painting by an asylum inmate. How very continental. They have been making music for over a decade and this, their debut album, is a beautifully packaged diagonal shoulder-bag full of mildly arty jazz-house which has already attracted sensational reviews. Even in [I]NME[/I] itself, this guitars’n’grooves collective have been likened to [a]Primal Scream[/a], [a]Spiritualized[/a] and Underworld.
Which makes it all the more baffling to report that the emperor is largely [I]sans vetements[/I] here. Because ‘Installation Sonore’ mostly consists of manicured beats and session-muso guitars for interior decor devotees. There’s a dash of Stardust-style neo-handbag glitter here, some mildly spicy Latin rhythms there, but the whole shebang scuttles listlessly along like some early-’80s jazz-funk fusion ‘project’. Especially painful is the axewank plodderama of ‘I Love My Guitar’, the kind of turgid Gallic [I]phonque rock[/I] dirgery which clueless twerps like Luc Besson used to soundtrack their dire films with.
Still, look on the bright side. At least French pop remains comfortingly crap outside the select coterie of Parisian disko dilettantes. To paraphrase Jacques Derrida, what a load of [I]merde[/I].