Another day. Another French band. This time it is Lille-based band Monsieur Thibault and they are clearly on a mission to make the world of music a quirkier place with their second album “Port-Cucu”.
Monsieur Thibault - Myriam Bovis, Philippe Delgrange, Frédéric L'Homme and Paul Muszynski – play their way through these eight songs as if complexity and rhythmic repetition was the only way to go. This is math rock but done with the kind of style that you only find in European bands where that combination of stylistic seriousness and deliberate diffidence have been honed to a sharp point. These are songs that seem to be the soundtrack to a movie set in dystopian future where man and machine have become competitive, and man, through sheer artistic stubbornness, is ahead on points. Quirkiness abounds in all that you hear with even the loops possessing an undeniable offbeat, and undeniably Gallic, charm.
Monsieur Thibault are certainly not a mainstream band yet there is much in this album that sounds almost familiar. This is a good thing as your ears don’t have to work as hard to make sense of what you hear yet, for those who regard themselves as connoisseurs of such things, it is that underlying dare to be different methodology makes this band special.
Available from Bandcamp on vinyl and from the usual, digital places.