THOT - The City That Disappears

The alias Thot, conceived and led by Belgian artist Gregoire Fray, stood out in the mid-2000s with performances that were in a way total, both auditory and visual, and a first full-length – “The Huffed Hue” (2005) – that brought back the harshest emanations of classic electronic rock.

After a long pause for internal reorganization, Fray returned with short releases and, above all, with “Obscured By The Wind” (2011), a hysterical, schizophrenic album capable of recalling the metal of Faith No More with extra doses of raw noise, especially in the 7 minutes of “Spellbound Fields”.

Three years later, “The City That Disappears” seems to embrace European synth-pop in its sound too, and the blend is livelier and more devilish than ever. Apocalyptic songs like “Rhythm.Hope.Answers” and “Negative Buildings” bring in elements of hip-hop and jungle, launching a Depeche Mode-esque vocal line toward a gloriously Wagnerian chorus.

Even the most “pop” track, “Blank Street”, still sounds wicked and bewitched, especially in its dazzling, chaos-driven close. Better still is “Citizen Pain”, a breathless nursery rhyme over a hammering beat in the vein of Nick Cave's “From Her To Eternity”, followed by a rowdy Rammstein-style build, topped off with 4 minutes of pure, perpetually boiling, cacophonous metallic ecstasy.

In “Keepers”, a crepuscular opening in the style of Notwist, with ethereal piano, is countered by a wall of electronic distortion, leading into the cold fantasy of synths, distortion pedals and gusts of guitar feedback on “Dedale”. The same goes for the techno-rock of “HTRZ”, torn apart by distortion and a dynamic tempo shift, and the trembling piano ballad “Traces”, jolted by electric shocks, building toward swirling vortexes of synth and guitar.

Out of grime elevated to the status of totem in Mitteleuropean underground discos, out of the wild creativity of Jim Thirwell and the poetry of scrap metal of Trent Reznor, Fray – a past as a skilled remixer of electro-rock classics – has carved out a revival album that is anything – given how captivating and unstable the songwriting is, and how pulsing the execution remains – but nostalgic. There's an iron yet spontaneous will to push these ideas to excellent levels of intensity. It draws its lifeblood from a sordid suburban vision, here and there with easy forcing, steeped in screamed damnation. A self-definition of his: “Vegetal noise music”. Co-produced with White Leaves Music. 

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20/07/2014