Sometimes it seems as if French duo Nôze are taking their label's imperative moniker, Get Physical, a little too seriously. Nicolas Sfintescu (aka DJ Freak, founder of the Circus Company label) and Ezéchiel Pailhès have always been hands-on-- their debut, Craft Sounds and Voices,was clattery music for the dust-up between the club and the bed-- but moments of Songs on the Rocks take things too far. Pailhes seems to play piano with his forehead; Sfintescu may be holding the backup singers at gunpoint. Songs on the Rocks retains its predecessor's funk affectations but applies them instead to cabaret pop, burying their rhythmic loops in the background. The results sound like the regurgitated Beefheart-isms of Man Man, but more condensed and cloistered.
"L'Inconnu Du Placard" opens Songs with a nervy conga drum and childlike xylophone, followed by a smoothly harmonized chorus. Then, ugliness: A guttural voice shouts absurdities alternately moving and laughable-- "C'mon baby!/ There is other ways/ To be happy," but later, "When I wake up in the morning/ I drink some wiiiiiiine." Guitars cluck and whinny while a rumbling bass loop undercuts the elliptical drum pattern. On eight-minute-plus centerpiece "Childhood Blues", a low-slung choir fights for room with minor-key piano chords and the album's most blip-worthy beat, as Sfintescu and a free-form electric guitarist fight over who sounds more risible. "I was not an unhappy kid!" he screams, and suddenly Funkadelic sound coherent by comparison.
If that all sounds a little loosey-goosey, it is: Nôze are best when they fit their oddities into skin-tight arrangements. The woodblock percussion and irritable horns of "Ethiopo" hew closest to the debut's wordless minutiae. "Slum Girl" marries the duo's most ambitious arrangement to date-- pulsing horns, martial tom hits, cinematic strings-- to a literalist, Waits-ian growl: "She was a little girl/ And she lived in the slum/ Didn't know her father/ Neither knew her mother." "Remember Love" gets it all right, taking the debut's hooky chanting and placing it over Pailhes' roiling piano and a wormy, club-ready beat. "I seize the daaaaaylight...Everybody's happy to be living love," goes the chorus, and suddenly the bizarre, empathetic storytelling of "Childhood Blues" and "Slum Girl" make a lot more sense.
"Remember Love", though, feels like an anomaly on Songs, which is ultimately a mess. "Kitchen", the bass-pop single that should've provided a blueprint for the whole record, is reworked as a dour Radiohead ballad. It ends a loose pot of ideas that barely hold together as an album-- gypsy blues, free-jazz skronk, minimal beatmaking, or just two Parisians in a room taking Macca's "Monkberry Moon Delight" a little too seriously, for 47 minutes.
