FACTUMS - The Sistrum

Yes: the Factums are the same ones behind “Alien Native”, the album we covered just a year ago, captivated as we were by its out-noise mosaic, “poised – as we put it then – somewhere between Residents, Cabaret Voltaire and lo-fi aesthetics”.

Before putting this “The Sistrum” into print, though, the Seattle trio had just managed, toward the end of 2007, to release another record, credited as “Spells And Charm”: a work that added nothing to what they'd already expressed before.

And truth be told, not even this new offspring shifts the center of gravity of their art by much, though it does at least show greater conviction and slightly less scattershot songwriting, with the usual unhealthy forays into a noise-rock worn down by lysergic chills and dark formal deformations.

In short, it's the same old world of gloomy shadows and misshapen emotions (“Fine Threads Of Everyday”), of degraded science fiction (the title track) and, why not, of post-apocalyptic visions in which, along what was once a suburban lane complete with little flowers and little birds, a troglodyte panzer now trudges forward to the beat of noise-rock thuds (“Origami”).

In a track like “Soundhole”, by contrast, the magic of the Amphetamine Reptile glory days returns, while “Ripples”, for its part, is perfect for conjuring up the ghost of SPK. And if “The Climb” and “De-arranged” dust off a glorious past (sonic San Francisco straddling the 70s and 80s), it's the disfigured landscape of “Rhapsody Of The Binturong” that attempts a less (ahem…) “academic” and more damned revisitation of it.

As they say: fans will find something to satisfy them here; everyone else is better off going back, first and foremost, to “Alien Native”.

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13/07/2008