2 out of 5

Label: Computer Students

Produced by: Guillaume Largillier

If there’s a genre I feel comfortable assessing, it’s instrumental math rock. A lot of other genres, I feel like I’m only shallowly acquainted with, so I’ll qualify my mixed feelings towards something, but instrumental math rock was the first splinter of indie music that I just knew I loved, and so pursued whole-heartedly, starting with Don Cab and venturing off into directions acoustic and hardcore and weird from there. And while Cheval De Frise’s guitar and drums wankery is pretty notable for its time – the early 2000s – it’s also not without precedent, taking a bit of the loose jazziness of Storm & Stress, and ramping it up with Breadwinner-like fire, and then surely some other influences thrown in there that are beyond me. But: across 13 tracks, I can’t really tell you what this duo are doing with those influences.

If you read that Breadwinner review, you’ll see there’s a tangential criticism, perhaps, of not really finding their material all that defined, and that’s certainly something you can say about a lot of instrumental groups that sprang up in the wake of Don Cab and Slint. Cheval De Frise’s album goes a step to the aside and beyond that in a way, though, by affecting their music with the utmost gusto, and yet not coming to a defined point. Tracks blip into climaxes for a moment and then forget about it; the guitar noodling and drumming are almost always at a fever pitch, but it’s loose – it’s that grindcore vibe where people are playing so fast it almost seems sloppy. In the middle of the disc you get Incliné Et Chenu, which is kind of an ideal template that has the group doing a more paced build to a release, though even this lacks a sense of range, as the recording levels everything out, whether they’re playing fast or slow, quiet (rarely) or loud. Shorter tracks – of which there are a few – are thus a bit more impactful, except that the quick changeups between riffs means that there’s not much to divide one song from the next.

I gave these several spins, thinking that I’d get more used to the pacing, and be able to differentiate between tracks as it became more familiar, and that’s not untrue, but the album never exactly opened up; I was fighting to hear nuance that I don’t think is there, as opposed to discovering it more organically. In the latter case, I’ll generally stumble across it listen by listen as more ‘clues’ unlock – the recording becomes deeper on each passing. Cheval De Frise is, instead, even-keeled: what you hear on the first go is essentially what you’ll hear on the second and third and so on. And conceptually, it’s appealing, with intricate guitar strums set against punky drumming and mathy constructions, but in practice, it rarely sits still long enough to establish anything to fully engage a listener.