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Faust, "C'est Com... Com... Compliqué"
The collage of two headed cats, tigers and smiling trees on the cover of this album sums up the merriment contained in the music within. It is exciting from the opening seconds and engaging to the end, I have been getting more pleasure from this album than I had been expecting. Although song-orientated, the pieces meander and are allowed to expand without becoming self-indulgent or overbearing. The band is pared down to a trio here and as a result the music is full, strong and, in refute of the album's title, uncomplicated.
Most of the pieces here have a strong groove to them, there is very little of the droning soundscapes that made up the bulk of Disconnected. This is most welcome as Faust were always at their best with a strong beat and a catchy riff. However, there is also little here of what would be traditionally considered a song; the music is like a runaway horse that pulls the band with it, the band doing their best to direct it. This all adds up to a glorious end result, tracks like “Kundalini Tremolos” and “En Veux-tu des Effets, en Voilà” steamroll along and are impossible not to get caught up in.
It is not all heavy rockin’ as the title track shows more of Faust’s abstract side, Jean-Hervé Péron’s wordplay sits atop a largely percussion-led piece with what sounds like looped guitar in the background and Zappi Diermaier’s drumming seems to be in constant flux, spinning the beats around and changing the momentum of the music in a strangely subliminal way. On the face of it, hundreds of bands do the same thing to much the same effect but even though they are at an age where the spark of inspiration has usually extinguished, Faust instil some magic into the music. There is a touch of the absurd which stops them falling into cliché (and this is reflected in the liner notes by Péron and Zappi).
The remarkable thing about this album is how little it sounds like Faust. While it is unmistakably them, the music on C’est Com... Com... Compliqué is very different to any of the new material released on any recent live albums and even Disconnected was a very different beast. This is especially surprising as Nurse With Wound used the same recordings to make Disconnected as Karsten Bötcher used to mix this new album (they were originally to be released at the same time as sister albums). The difference is so huge that I cannot even identify what bits Steven Stapleton had taken for Disconnected bar one or two glaringly obvious bits. This situation is a bit of history repeating considering how different Faust’s early albums were despite being culled from the same sessions.
C’est Com... Com... Compliqué is a stunning album (and certainly my favorite out of the two being released this week) that sounds as fresh as any of Faust’s best albums. Although I am a big Faust fan, I did not think they could ever recapture the power and joy of their early years but with this album they have achieved that goal and they have done it without rehashing any old ideas.
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