In the first few minutes of Rabit’s Les Fleurs Du Mal, the gloomy Texan producer (aka Eric Burton) does something unexpected: He cracks a joke. At least, that’s one interpretation of a scrap of found sound that flutters briefly above the ambient din. “Possessed,” the album’s first song, begins in medias res: A low rumble, inaudible voices, bursts of what might be police scanner. “Chop it up,” commands a low voice, threatening and authoritative. From the snatches of conversation we overhear—“Break that off, that’s a whole cookie”; “You got the money?”—it seems likely we have dropped into the middle of a drug deal. A sampled cello scrapes circles around the outline of a melody; the atmosphere could not be more ominous if this were a scene from Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day. A woman murmurs in French; another woman bellows about the devil. Out of this bewildering murk, a man’s voice pipes up in a reedy Southern drawl: “This is the beginning part.” Amid all that humid terror, it’s practically a knee-slapper: a signpost that serves to highlight the dimensionless and disorienting sound-world Burton has conjured.
Burton titled his album after Charles Baudelaire’s volume of nihilistic poetry, and it’s not hard to understand why; his suffocating air of self-loathing is an obvious inspiration for the toxic depths of Rabit’s airless, album-length tone poem. The record’s 12 tracks swirl together into an unsteady whole, and the usual structural elements—melody, rhythm, lyrics—are largely absent. In their place, a freeform sense of drift, muggy and narcotic, prevails. Much of the album has an explicitly filmic cast: “Roach” throbs with explosions, plangent strings, and chattering electronics like a dystopian supercut of Hollywood soundtracks; “The Whole Bag” groans under a similar kind of THX-driven ear pressure, as clanking metal tiptoes out to the border between representational and abstract sound. In “Humanitys Daughter,” there’s a glowering, pitched-down reference to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” while electronic tones cascade like freezing rain; if you could record your nightmares, they might well sound a lot like this.
In many ways, Les Fleurs Du Mal feels like a logical extension of Rabit’s last album, 2015’s Communion, in which the sounds of gunshots and breaking glass were stitched into an eerie approximation of club music. To follow Rabit’s artistic development is to enter into a world of dissolving certainty, where all light is gradually leached out of the landscape. Ever since Burton’s first records, which imitated the sounds of the UK’s “weightless” strain of instrumental grime, he has gradually stripped his music of all references to conventional dance music, and with Les Fleurs Du Mal, that process becomes terrifyingly complete. The press release suggests the new album shares kinship with Elysia Crampton’s Demon City and Chino Amobi’s Paradiso—deeply original albums about identity and alienation that created their own haunting sound worlds—and the comparison holds up. (Burton contributed to both those albums, and Amobi reappears here, along with Coil’s Drew McDowall and an artist known simply as Cecilia.) But Burton’s album, in its willingness to jettison so many musical hallmarks in pursuit of an experience of pure formlessness, might be the most radical of the three.
It reaches a terrifying nadir a little before the halfway mark with “Dogsblood Redemption.” The track opens with the wails of a baby over horror-movie rumble; brief snippets of heavy metal and bits of movie or television dialogue slice through the darkness. There are wails and moans of pain. And then, louder than anything else, the clearest statement on the entire record comes bellowing through the speakers, mixed conspicuously louder than everything else: “You’re all a bunch of fuckin’ slaves!” The track ends with a passage of German-language dialogue and what sounds like coitus, and abruptly cuts off in mid-sentence—a jarring short-circuit even in an album full of discontinuity.
Despite the omnipresent grimness, though, Les Fleurs Du Mal can also be strangely beautiful. “Bleached World,” a skeletal and meandering fugue that utilizes just one synthesizer sound, summons the same stark grace as Arca’s music does. “Ontological Graffiti” sinks into slowly bowed drones as evocative as the buzz of airplanes high overhead, and the closing passage of “Prayer II (Gemme)” and “Elevation” make for a pillowy denouement: Strings sweep backward and a voice speaking in French is slowed and shrouded in whispers, sounding druggy and dreamlike. It is an elegant conclusion to an album that feels at once as oppressive as a lead blanket and as diffuse as a wisp of incense. However you might choose to approach the album—as ambient music, radio play, fetid sustenance for misanthropic shut-ins—it is a singular piece of work, and a bold step forward for Rabit’s inky aesthetic.
