On Les Georges Leningrad's previous album, Sur les Traces de Black Eskimo, there was still room to maneuver between the band's dynamite-blast basslines and singer Poney P's perpetually startled yelp. But Sangue Puro offers no such respites: It's as claustrophobic as the cave evoked by its bat motif artwork. Scraps of dentist-drill synths, telegraphic bass, and ceremonial drumwork reiterate themselves with maddening regularity, their jagged barbs strung out in violently hypnotic patterns. The title track is particularly itchy-- it has the satisfying quality of a manual typewriter carriage sliding home, its ravaged 8-bit squelch and lunging drums simulating pass after pass over the same irritated area.
This transition from off-kilter dancepunk to something more droning and difficult to classify smacks of Liars' artistic arc, but there are important distinctions: Les Georges started off weirder but have wound up more intelligible, and while Liars' drone epic Drum's Not Dead contains open, shimmering spaces where one can catch a breath, Sangue Puro hunkers down in close, dark regions, so the resultant transportation is more nauseous than euphoric. Seemingly endless loops sear themselves into your brain-- the decaying synth jitter that slices through the nervous drums and flighty electronic squiggles of "Skulls in the Closet", the baggy bass wheeze of "Scissorhands", the antic Saturday-morning cartoon theme that bleats unrelentingly through "Mammal Beats".
For art-rockers, Les Georges are great at making music that's at once weird and humble. The absurd club track "Sleek Answer", complete with awkward raps from Poney P, proves that they haven't lost their sense of humor amid this otherwise serious and panicky album. Elsewhere, her incantatory vocals only draw the noose tighter, as on "Mange Avec Tes Doigts", where she squeaks unintelligibly over acid-bathed surf rock. 'Singing' is a pretty abstract concept on a Les Georges album; it involves just using your voice in some deranged way, and by the time "Lonely Lonely" rolls around, it's de-evolved to infantile grunting.
This sort of de-evolution is what Les Georges is all about; Sangue Puro is at once intriguing and frustrating because it never breaks through the top, or bottoms out on the evolutionary range. In fact, we don't even get to see the range; the music is perpetually stuck in one knuckle-dragging, slime-trailing state. It'd be nice if it occasionally rose to its feet, or dropped down to crawl on its belly like a snake, but with Les Georges Leningrad, you take what you get-- if you can take it.
