New - Bracco - Dromonia - LP

A record: what is it good for? Remembering the gig. Convincing a significant other to come. Helping musicians ruin their health preserving our own. Most of all: a record is a great companion to a concert. You can extrapolate all kinds of things from it. With memories from every angle you witnessed live. A record contains all that, you just need to let it unfold. Dromonia, second album after Grave, is one of those small papers folded with insistence until they become harder than wood. The ones on which you wrote the most important of things. Death, confessions, mistakes. Bracco, on stage: Loren, drumsticks in hand, busy working machines and synths. And Baptiste, guitar-strapped, singing with the mic close to disappear in his throat, to make words come out right (those Cramps' VHS tapes have left their mark). Built in a garage band (Los VV's), the guitar sound is harsh and precise. Baptiste deals with verticality, Loren with space: building fast with crappy materials but high hopes. Bracco has the kind of smooth and wet skin labels can't stick to. Still, they let their music be haunted by ghosts of the dark wave family. They fancy Psychic TV, DAF, Suicide, Throbbing Gristle. Music veterans will note that Bracco has that distinctive sound of pivotal periods when everything gets dicey (the day guitar made its way into techno, that moment when punks learned a fourth chord, the night the Happy Mondays entrusted Bez with maracas). That path is paved with brave records. "Sunshine" and "Secretly Dancing" are good examples of that stateless crossover where the guitar/drums treatment is a success. The clinical and efficient mix of producer Marc Portheau incites to play the record harder than the current shitty atmosphere. Together, they gave the tracks the industrial treatment. Lauriane, from shoegazers Bryan's Magic Tears, joined them for a vocal featuring. "Cobra Music", the first single, is one of those marathon tracks built to be played to exhaustion. Be there at the end.