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[PLOT SUMMARY]
DESCRIPTION:
I've become a real sucker for arty French hardcore and metal. It's almost without fail that I totally get hooked on anything coming out of the French heavy underground anymore. And I almost passed on this one, simply due to the goofy album cover which depicts a gaggle of little girls dressed in, you guessed it, bumblebee costumes. But you know, I gave it a shot just 'cuz it was French, and whaddya know but Cissetive turned out to be a fantastic album of post-rocky, Temporary Residence-influenced post-hardcore. Sure, Envy are the masters of this style in Japan, no question about it, but this is a sound that's the French have been continuing to explore for a couple of years now, and they're really perfected that combination of heavy, explosive hardcore and fragile, brooding instrumental rock. Gantz and Amanda Woodward are two of the better known bands doing this stuff, but Bumblebees' are equally great, mixing together mighty Neurosis/Isis crunch, harmonica-laced spacey folk-pop, epic riff instrumentals a la Pelican / Red Sparowes / Tides, jazzy, sax-driven ambient rock, a crooning singer delivering his lyrics in French, Codeine-esque slow core, and lurching math-rock. Bumblebees take all of those elements and keep Cissetive a cohesive, well-written album - man, this band would/should be huge, I can't believe it took me this long to find out about 'em. The album closes with the sprawling 19 minute epic “Stolnjak”, which shifts between delicate post-rock strum and tangles of crushing metallic heaviness; the track is actually cut in half by about seven minutes of silence, but when the end of the track kicks in, whoa...it suddenly becomes a moody, insanely catchy shoegaze jam, kinda like a heavier MBV, or Ride, or Swervedriver, you get the picture, the song is that good. Can't recommend this disc enough, which sucks 'cuz we actually only have a couple of copies in stock, and we're not sure if we're going to be able to get this back in stock or not.
REVIEW FROM MONOCHROM:
This record is big. The sound is massive, even though it remains in softer territory most of the time, but when Bumblebees break loose their own version of posthardcore-guitar-rock they sure draw up an electric storm of intensity. This band uses their means very elegantly and effectively. Sometimes they’ll kick the frontdoor in, other times they’ll politely knock on the door, step back and wait for you to open. Either way they’ll gonna leave you exhausted when they go.
“cissetive” is an addictive record. It doesn’t look like much at first glance – the cover with those four little ballet-girls dressed up as bees is just too obvious as a joke to be taken seriously – but that soon changes when you start to listen. In a short sentence: Bumblebees are able to create tension, a powerful massive sort of tension, without using the regular means, like brutality (grindcore), walls of sounds with samples (Industrial) or evil associations (death metal). Whereas others of my favourite intense bands, like Neurosis, Pig Destroyer or Meshuggah, who forfeit any kind of image or using icons in design and style to permeate their intensity but still use a very direct approach of heaviness with distorted, downtuned guitars, pounding drums, throat-breaking screaming vocals and so on. Bumblebees have found a different approach: intensity by softness. Softness not as much meant as a fluffy tiny little something with big eyes that asks for a crumb of bread, but rather softness as the opposite of harsh disruption or an evolutionary, natural growth from one beautiful sound to the next. Sounds paradox? Well, it is somehow. But then again not, as soon as you listen to the record. Everybody knows water is not tangible, flows away and can’t be held, but hit it with 75 miles an hour and it feels like pure concrete. Remember that water is used to cut stones in industrial areas. Everyone has felt and cuddled into soft blankets and other cloths, but roll it on a pile and you can break someone’s neck. And Bumblebees pile soft, emotional and sometimes also melancholic parts upon one another until they have produced an immense, impressive wall of sound that has already grapped you and starts to drag you away.
The levels of emotive softness and encapturing emotionality used are varying from song to song. Whereas songs like “Triangle” or “Bordel de Chacal” break in quite heavy (in relation to the rest) and also has screaming vocals on top between the more laidback parts, “Smazene Syr” drags along quite slowly and finds its miniscule eruption of emotion within a lonely, screeching saxophone solo. In between they involuntarily turn towards modern folk rock, especially when the singer sounds very much like the one from The National, or towards emo-pop of all the well-known names. Bumblebees don’t steer away from chaotic eruptions of saxophones and noise, but all within the aforementioned frame of natural development. I’ll attribute it to the fact that this band has been together quite long, their history going back to 1996 even. Which gave them enough time to evolve, learn and create and to get to know each other. Otherwise such a structure only works out with the most open-minded of artists, and those are hard to be found.
This tactic is of itself of course nothing completely new. Natsat from French are on a similar path, without the vocals and using a lot higher dergree of postrock. If anyone remembers “Frigid Stars” by Codeine, which gripped me tightly from its first legendary D-Chord and built up intensity by actually doing nothing or as little as possible. (This record would have deserved an entry in best records for a long time. When will the opportunity arise.) I also remember when back in the early Nineties a few young men came together in Washington DC, all of them with a history of playing in other bands, from straight raging hardcore to jazz, and recorded “The lurid traversal of route seven” under the moniker of Hoover on Dischord records, what a revelation that was. Intensity stretched over seven to eight minutes of hardcore songs that weren’t hardcore songs anymore but something that has stepped a few levels up from there. Fucking brilliant. Nowadays I am older, so I don’t get excited that easily anymore (which is a pity and I regret it a lot), but just a few days ago, when someone asked me, which records got me excited in the last weeks I named “cissetive” (next to Kraken Oxen, Sinistri and “Origins of Fire” by Hildegard von Bingen).
This one set next to my player for quite a long time. For no special reason actually, but I listened to it more often and regularly in the last weeks than I do to most records I want to do a review on. Why I didn’t get round to writing that review down is beyond me. Maybe I was afraid that as soon as I had the review finished, I’d be so busy listening to other stuff waiting to be reviewed, that I wouldn’t get around to listen to “cissetive” anymore. Which happens, I guess.
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[CONDITION+INFO]
BRAND NEW, UNPLAYED ITEM STILL SEALED IN SHRINKWRAP.
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>> WE DEAL IN HEAVY JAMS << |
CRUCIAL BLAST is an independant underground label and mailorder specializing in cutting edge, "experimental" heavy music from the indie universe with a particular focus on avant-Metal, heavy mutant noise and drones, and edgy/abrasive/weird "outsider" rock and pop. You'll find everything from art-damaged European metalcore to amplifier-exploding psychedelic drones in our listings, which we update every week. We like our sounds weird, and we like 'em heavy. You're not going to find the popular flavor-of-the-month "alternative" music here...these are new mutations in extreme music.
>> SHIPPING AND PAYMENT INFO <<
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