VAISSEAU MONDE

It's a great time to be a fan of adventurous music. This is the kind of album I dream about coming across. It starts out with a great slab of face-smashing neo-Zeuhl, a lot like Koenjihyakkei. But by the middle of the second track, it's in a pretty unique space, with kaleidoscopic tone-painting, much of it non-pitched percussion and perhaps samples of indeterminate origin. Not knowing anything about the band when I first started listening, I almost immediately suspected it was PoiL's rhythm section. Well, it's actually the whole band, augmented by percussion and two lady singers who are absolutely remarkable, playing phoneme games reminiscent of Stockhausen's Stimmung with unbelievable precision over hairpin rhythmic arrangements. For most listeners, this album will be WAY out there, but it actually brings together some cool musical threads in a unique way. And it's easily as heavy as whatever your perception of the heaviest metal band is, despite there being no guitar in the vicinity. Genius level.