reviews / 2010

UNIVERS ZERO - Clivages

Name: UNIVERS ZERO – Clivages
Item: Clivages
Rating: 5
Author: Marco Sgrignoli

2010 (Cuneiform)

chamber-prog

by Marco Sgrignoli

Anyone who knows the Univers Zéro at all knows what to expect from a new album. For everyone else, it's quickly explained: a unique, tense and enveloping sound – strings and winds woven together as refined as they are unsettling, rhythmic interlocking straight out of Stravinsky, rare and oblique guitar cuts.

"Clivages" is exactly that, as indeed have been the band's last few records over the past couple of decades. Choosing one or the other is essentially a matter of taste: personally, I found the jazzy abstraction of "Rhythmix" (2002) more evocative than this extremely polished exercise. What penalizes the album the most, though, is the particularly clean mixing: the sounds don't form that murky, searing amalgam which has always been UZ's trump card.

There are still a few fine moments, though, especially the more Holst-like ones ("Warrior") and the crooked ones ("Scubresauts", a hair's breadth from Thinking Plague). Here and there, the old necromancy comes back to life.

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16/04/2010

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Marco Sgrignoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition

Tracklist

1. Les Kobolds
2. Warrior
3. Vacillements
4. Earth Scream
5. Scubresauts
6. Apesantetur
7. Three Days
8. Straight Edge
9. Retour de foire
10. Les cercles d'Horus

UNIVERS ZERO on the web

Univers Zéro profile

Myspace

Univers Zero on OndaRock

Monograph

Univers Zero

The Heresy of Chamber Rock

Drawing on classical music and jazz, Belgium's Univers Zero charted a peculiar "European" path to rock, through dark suites and bizarre inventions. As on the avant-garde "Heresie," the formal pinnacle of their project