Album Review

Èlg – La Chimie (SDZ, 2013)

elg - la chimie album cover
ÈlgNotringo Indigo (SDZ)

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This dude Ghedalia Thazartès Laurent Gérard (thanks Ian!) (of Opéra Mort, Reines d’Angleterre, etc) is all over the place with his Èlg releases, jumbling genres like nothing, and La Chimie adds to the cacophony, bringing a sort of fucked up darkwave mixed with the occasional field recording, the album opens with a vomit inducing first track that’s got creepy found sounds including some dude sobbing while the electronics sound like boiling guts, so fucking wretched I can smell it. The rest of the record twists together a woozy mangled avant pop that ranges from burnt musique concrète to a more structured techno groove, spilling beats all over a bleak futuristic synth sprawl, nightmare ambient b/w Carpenter disco, and Thazartès freaking the fuck out in every track, singing with a mesmerizing atonal processed to hell & back slop of a rollercoaster, like Paul Reubens voicing the spaceship in Flight Of The Navigator, his vocals driving the record, definitely the most prominent and unsettling part, totally incomprehensible & fucked up, a mess on top of a mess but bound by the bizarre, hands down one of the weirdest records of the year, a winner for sure.