LES 3 FOUS PERDEGAGNENT - AU PAYS DES...

Second album, from this whacked-out group released in 78 and Grand replacing Chanet on wind instruments, and guest guitarist Verttyo to lend a hand. If indeed EFL was one of the original signataires of the RIO chart, musically-speaking, they sounded often the least progressive of them, sometimes closer to punk and they were definitely one of their more vocal groups in the RIO pigeonhole together with Stormy Six. But although still-raw-sounding, Les Trois Fous (full title means the three madmen winandloose in the land), it's easily a proggier album than debut Batelages.

Opening on the almost Gong-esque Face à L'Extravagante Montée where you where you'd swear that Malherbe and Hillage have gone one step further, the album continues Fleuve & Manteau; where the spoken dual vocals over a wild Velvet Underground-like pattern with a sax running wild. After hilariously short Reportage, Recherche is a slow-developing hardcore fuzzed-out sax piece. The flipside is occupied mainly by a harmonica-led VU-like rhythms with RIO staccatos, and it's more reminiscent if Batelages, where the vocals go overboard The weird and whacked out vocals continue in Pouriissement des Organes (some excellent interplay in its second part) and in the closing Bilande weird thing.

By listening to this and other albums of EFL, it's easy to see where 90's sax-led trios got their inspirations and influences from. Indeed Morphine and Volapuk owe a lot to EFL's early works. A good album, especially in its first half, one that would've received a better rating if its longest track had lasted half its length and replaced by something else.