Gablé - 7 Guitars With A Cloud Of Milk

LOAF

A curious album this. It opens with ‘No One Knows Why’ a song about group suicide, a maniacally recited litany of petrol supping, rooftop jumping, stabbing and hanging. As the title might suggest, there is no explanation for these acts. It is all rather unsettling, paranoiac and sinister, like the screenplay of an M. Night Shyamalan film. The sense of dread is exacerbated by the vocal, an unhinged croon that is accompanied by all manner of musical oddity, the initial guitar strum building momentum before eventually breaking into a choir and trumpets finale. This is only the beginning.

The brief ‘Ella’ is a lament for days past, an old-fashioned 1920s music hall romp. A few tracks along and we’ve got the electronica cabaret of ‘Second Rhythm’. This French trio certainly know how to bewilder their audience and perhaps the only characteristic that unites the various tracks is their uniform oddness. An undoubtedly challenging album, 7 Guitars With A Cloud Of Milk is also on occasion entertaining. Still, it’s not the sort of album you can become comfortable with, every time it threatens to hit a groove it immediately turns face and hares off in another direction, hankering for something new, be it the hip-hop of ‘Purée Hip-Hop’, the drum ‘n’ bass propulsion of ‘Sam Et Pilou’ or the baroque instrumental that is ‘Full Blast’.

With 18 tracks in just under 40 minutes there are as many mis-steps here as there are moments of real musical clarity. Still, when they get it right Gablé are intriguing and enjoyable, note closer ‘Drunk Fox In London’, a surreal short story whose initial chiming guitars are crushed beneath a barrage of fierce percussion and a sound that could only be described as a computer having a nervous breakdown. It’s the sort of high-octane freakery that could quite easily find itself as the centrepiece of an episode of The Mighty Boosh. If only Gablé could rein in the lunacy a touch and make some concessions to cohesion they might have created something marvellous, as it stands 7 Guitars With A Cloud Of Milk is slightly more baffling than brilliant. Francis Jones

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DOWNLOAD: ‘NO ONE KNOWS WHY’, ‘MISERABLE SONG’, ‘DRUNK FOX IN LONDON’.
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