Album Reviews
Mr Oizo - Lambs Anger
If Justice built the house of French dance thrash, Mr. Oizo tears it down on Lambs Anger. Deconstruction is nothing new for France’s l’enfant dancible. Mr. Oizo’s (pronounced WAH-zoh) cut-and-paste musical process first lit up the radar on the international scene in 1999. As a music-video director, Quentin Dupieux, aka Mr. Oizo, wrote a song for a Levi’s commercial (starring a yellow puppet named Flat Eric. Google it!), then dropped it (“Flat Beat”) into his experimental breakbeat album, Analog Worms Attack. In 2005, with his second album, Moustache (Half a Scissor), Dupieux pushed his sound forward, marrying fragmented samples with hyperkinetic synth tracks that could have crawled out of a Casio keyboard. Mr. Oizo seldom fits into the musical zeitgeist, choosing instead to forge new genres—and Moustache (Half a Scissor) did just that as the prototype for the French revolution waged by Justice and other Ed Banger Records alumni. On Lambs Anger, Dupieux births a bizarre little baby. The record reveals influences from Afrika Bambaataa, Daft Punk, and vinyl deconstructionists like Kid Koala, but overall, the bizarre production of the album—chopped-up funk samples, cheese-ball analog keyboards, and tongue-in-cheek vocal snippets (“Bruce Willis Is Dead”)—distinctly brands Lambs Anger as none other than Mr. Oizo. By far his most listenable album, it dispenses with julienned beats in favor of constant pumping of the French House kick drum (see also, Daft Punk’s “Da Funk”). “Cut Dick” is a hilariously corny funk song that, somehow, is totally satisfying with its ridiculous keyboard-sax solo over the unceasing bass drum. Partially engorged with huge rave sounds of the mid-’90s, “Pourriture 2,” “Pourriture 7,” and “Gay Dentists” improve Euro-House synth licks and super-reverbed-out drum machines with wiggle-inducing rhythms. Many of the album cuts could be club singles on their own, but the minimalist, electro cut “Steroids,” featuring Paris-based, bratty-rap wunderkind Uffie sorta rapping over soul claps and booty bass, proves to be one of the most strangely sexy dance tracks of the year. Lambs Anger has so much going on, including an irresistibly silly remake of “It Takes Two,” that it is nearly impossible to process it all now; reflecting upon it in a year will prove that Lambs Anger was the prime mover in a generation of something new. And something truly weeeeeird.
from Flaunt Magazine, Issue 101 Jan 2009
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