4 out of 5

Label: Africantape

Produced by: Miguel Constantino

Ach, those mad Africantape boys and girls have whipped up yet another mostly instrumental band of note: Marvin.  Heading a bit more down the electro aisle – add a dash of early Trans Am to your Slint-y rawk – Marvin, on their second release, execute with the kind of full-steam ahead ambition that made Oxes such a listening pleasure, even when that band’s compositions tended toward generics.  While this French trio has enough variation in their mix to avoid any such criticism, neither are they so extreme  (e.g. the blitz of Ex-Models, or the abstraction of label mates Chevreuil) as to totally shake up the genre; what they do, they do exceedingly well, but you can mostly still describe it as instrumental rock.

And when they do stray further from that format, with Daft Punk vocals and a Knodel-like chintziness, it’s almost a distraction from the disc’s flow: we’re glad that ain’t the groups m.o. at all times, even if the aforementioned energy in the presentation sells it all damned effectively; i.e. the deviations work because they’re bite-sized, but it’s still a stutter-step to adjust to the change-ups.

Bonus points for the out right noise-scape cover of Here Come the Warm Jets; double bonus points for just being an awesome good time.