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The Powder Blind Dream
[Darla/LTM]
It's always a great surprise when a band reforms itself after twenty years of silence. The surprise often turns to disappointment, but sometimes, it turns to enthusiasm. In Crispy Ambulance case, a "Factory" stamped band, close to Joy Division and Manchester cold ambiences, the come-back album, "Scissorgun", the second studio album of their career, was undeniably a total success. But then, we didn't expect any following as we thought the band only released this second record to successfully pass their mid-age crisis; or we could have feared that a new album, created with "normal" deadlines, i.e. without the twenty years of musical frustrations which previously drove them to produce an album, might be a total failure with no inspiration whatsoever.
The four old post-punk members of Crispy Ambulance prove us now, with this superb "The Powder Blind Dream", that they kept intact the talent and originality that made a cult band of them. The myth is dead as the band is reborn from its ashes, and even if it's not newspapers' headlines, as the times are dedicated to other musical styles, their music is still the best way to get high emotions, mixing anger, cynicism, coldness and sadness. Alan Hempsall sings like a possessed man on a background of omnipresent, padded and almost psychedelic guitars (we think of Dr Phibes & the House of Wax Equations) that cut like ice. The bass, typical of this genre, sings all along without yielding to the guitar, as for the drums, they make matters "worse" with their rhythmics, dancing and monolithic at the same time. The synthesizer re-appears a bit, with its long lost sounds, far from techno, reserved for little surrealistic or anguishing touches.
You'll be amazed by the "Brazilian" ravings of Triphammer, you'll travel in time with the ghosts of cold Manchester on Four Line Whip or Lucifer Rising, you'll brush against despair with Bad Self and you'll float in the existentialist nothingness of Chimera, but you won't stay indifferent to these raw emotion little tracks coming from the unexplored zones of your brain, somewhere between dream and nightmare.
At the end of the album, we wonder how we could have lived twenty years without this band.
Frédéric Thébault |
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