CODE INCONNU – s/t
(LP – noise appeal)
Take a big sip of the Butthole
Surfers’ weirdness. Take another big shovel of focus and concentration.
Take a whiff of mid-eighties Indierock vocals. Take a well-leveled ounce of
half structuralism and half deconstructivism and mix. Add bass distortion
and loads of amplification. Stand with both legs rooted firmly to the
ground. Turn On and shine down with a penchant for excess and a will to
weirdness as a mean to an end. Watch it fall down and build itself up again
and again. Wait for it to boil without any help or energy infusion from the
outside. Burn down the house. Repeat.
After half a dozen great noise
rock albums from Austria last year (Striggles, Reflector, Men Killing Men, Delilah, Bug, come to mind – seems that any place
outside of Vienna is good for great noiserok in this country, in the capital
it is more songwriters and pop sensibility. Make of that what you will.)
this year starts off great with another one: the self titled third album by
Code Inconnu. To release it as a twelve inch album via noise appeal and as a
cd-r via chmafu records is a statement in itself, about something. More
about choices than the state of the music business, because what kind of
business are we talking about here? Probably mostly about that you can never
be sure what awaits you with this band. Constantly re-configuring itself
both in personnel and musical vision, they are now a five piece with fixed
singer, but that does not make them a rock-band in the traditional sense.
They are heavy but not hard, they are weird but not chaotic, they are unique
but not introvert, they play loud but never bold. There is a major feeling
of fluxus in the songs, or rather in the missing structures that make up the
songs, and it seems – to do some retro-philosophizing – that they are
more about what is not in the noiserock they play, but what is in there.
Sounds complicated, but isn’t. Not to listen to, anyway, if you open your
ears and mind and try not to think about it too much.
Why the heck The Wire found a
comparison to Tortoise
within Code Inconnu is way beyond me. From the pounding bass, the singing
and the weirdness this is nowhere close to anything I remember about
Tortoise. Well, who am I to complain about comparisons, when half the time
people don’t understand mine, and after a while I even forget how I came
upon some of them. And then this whole thing about the Wire (yes, bible and
so forth…) and what they write about a band, is it really that important?
Probably yes, because in this time of internet-blogs and social media word
of mouth all you get is affirmative mentions. Out there are a gazillion
blogs telling you how great something is, and that covers everything, but
what is missing is a blog telling what is shitty. It ain’t me either,
because of two simple reasons: first, my time is too precious to be spending
energy on something that is awfully bad or even mediocre. And second, the
new album by “Code Inconnu” is really great. It even is probably a
stroke of genius in some ways, but as usual, this kind of final judgement is
left all to you.
