5 out of 5

Label: Sickroom

Producer: Steve Albini

So if I understand the pitch correctly, we got a guitar dude playing a little sample, then feeding it back to himself and playing another little sample atop that, which gets – separately – fed into and back through another channel.  Multiply this by up to four times, courtesy of guitar maestro Tony C., who seems to be handling this all without it sounding sloppy or unintended – at least as far as Albini’s live recording of this process captures – and then Julien F. does a jazz, post/rock dance atop the results, again, keeping pace and making the stuttering evolution of these tracks a slick rush.  For their third album, Chevreuil added keys to the mix – apparently from Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart – and, according to the wiki, another guitar trick via the ‘la guitare magnetique’ – which, from what I can understand, allows for notes and tones to ring out and fade until death, manipulated by the instrument’s ‘sustain’ levels.  I suppose.

It sounds like a bunch of wank and I’m not a Xiu Xiu fan.  However, when I lucked across Chev’s first couple discs (‘Chateuvallon’ and ‘Sport’) in a Tower Records shipment and gave ’em a spin, even though the sound isn’t as honed as it is on Capoeria, I would’ve had no idea that the above was going on.  Chalk it up to mad skills of the players and having some compositional smarts: the tricks are all in support of producing some badass tracks, Tony C. using the layering to give his riffs resonance and something to work against but in a drop in/ drop out way that would be difficult to fully effect with a live group – though the equally mad geniuses in Battles approximate something similar with a totally different approach – and Julien’s pulsing movement between staccato blasts and more organic passages is inexplicably smooth when it’s considered that there must be a degree of improv on both artists behalf… which means that that chalk you used must also make a mark under the communication column.  Despite however much planning can go into this setup, its still a manual process, and thus things are going to fall slightly off time – which you can certainly hear at points – but the boys pick it up and roll it back into the songs, molding things in a way that I would think only works when you’re in sync with the dude backing you up.

And then we must credit Mr. Albini.  Other producers might’ve shaved some edges off of this performance, or decided that the sleight-of-hand composition was deserving of a more mechanical or processed tone.  By mic-ing this stuff so it’s raw and in your ears, you believe in it all; it has a sense of immediacy that counters all implications of wankness.

‘Capoeria’s tracks are absolutely more direct than what’s came before.  There’s less of a sense of cut and paste improvisation on here – a la Oxes inability to stick to a riff for more than few passes – with a definite shift toward riding the rock for a whole track’s worth of awesome, ‘Gendarme’ a particular highlight and the intro build-up found on ‘Chanteur de Charme’ a perfect example of how this performing method – complicated as it must be – can be used to create simple and satisfying songs as well as layers of noise.