Zombie Zombie - A Land For Renegades

Versatile

Building tension like Alfred Hitchcock, if he was making music in 1970s Cologne, Zombie Zombie have arrived all spooky and glacial. Like English bands Kling Klang and Fujiya & Miyagi before them – and Stereolab long before them – they’ve tapped the little-mined resource of Krautrock and come up with a gem of a debut album. Growing up on a diet of horror flicks, Neu! and Silver Apples, Paris-based duo Etienne Jaumet and Cosmic Neman have neatly combined their influences into a satisfyingly warped whole. Conceived as the soundtrack for a film, this mostly instrumental record follows Holy Fuck’s lead in combining vintage synthesisers with pounding live drums. Snippets of paranoid spoken word (“some creatures play games with you, but you won’t see them!”) and unspecified weird background noises add to the oppressive atmosphere, but it’s done with enough cheeky panache as to stay the fun side of spooky. If the Trans-Europe Express was a ghost train, it would sound something like this. Chris Jones

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DOWNLOAD: ‘DRIVING THIS ROAD UNTIL DEATH SETS YOU FREE’, ‘BEFORE NIGHT FALLS’, ‘PSYCHIC HARMONIA 2’.
FOR FANS OF: NEU!, KLING KLANG, LIARS.

Issue #52 - Very Bro-some

Featuring Panama Kings, ASIWYFA, an investigation into DIY touring, details of what over 25 of the finest NI bands are up to in 2009 and much more.