Critic's evaluation
It's been five years since their debut French album Prisme, and M'Z have returned the spotlight to themselves by announcing their latest material. Entitled La Civilisation De La Graine, the band's second studio album follows Cool Is Watching You, the first EP in their discography.
You can feel a viscous liquid, like placenta, enveloping the bodies. Cold and warm colors suddenly form waltzes on the outside of this kind of domination while the feeling of comfort gives way to the awakening of the initiative to get rid of such almost uterine protection. With his eyes still closed, the character slowly opens his eyelids and begins to see, with a blurred vision, the realistic landscape, a little distant from that ecstatic calm that the unconscious was offering him. This happens when, between high notes and in hypnotic syntony, the bass invades the scene and starts to unravel conscious and rational doses to the environment. With a marked cadence and a body that delivers certain pressure touches, the instrument starts to receive the help of the tinkles of the dome of the driving board, which helps to build a more active beat and embryonic excitement. With the entrance of the keyboard, there is a delivery of psychedelic, introspective, and even hallucinogenic energies that allow a free walk through a state of trance. Meanwhile, a sound of numbing joy and resplendent luminosity creates new textures to the ecstasy that is drawn from a melody that blends sixties and seventies ambiences from the swing, and the mix of psychedelia and progressiveness. And in the meantime, Des Re Cits surprises with the entrance of a second guitar that delivers aggressiveness, pressure, and consistency in the rhythmic base. In the midst of its dialogue for emotional transition through maturation, peace and chaos share the same space. And so it is also among the genres that govern its melody. After all, besides having psychedelic and progressive rock, Des Re Cits also brings, by means of rhythm guitar and bass, a simple immersion in the jazz field. The song works as a corruption of naivety.
Tones of an opaque red tear through the darkness of the night. Pulled by the low, precise bass and carefully placed presence, the melody takes on a somber, fearful air as the drums and guitars take their respective positions. Curious to note that the two guitars begin to function as two omnipresent, mind-bending characters. It is almost like the good angel and the evil angel simultaneously trying to persuade the host. Still, the listener can perceive himself, through the sonic density of Edifions De Temples Absurdes, in the midst of an uprising. Windows shattered. Fire everywhere. Overturned cars. Blood. The fury in the eyes of the protesters. The unquenchable thirst for chaos. For institutionalized disorder. In a way, the dialogue proposed in Des Re Cits is continued in Edifions De Temples Absurdes, a song that also brings a rough swing that provides a curiously contagious immersion in the field of hard rock, blues and hardcore in bursts that help to raise the energy of the song.
The way the guitar is presented provides the building of a more introspective and even reflective scenario. It is as if the listener sees himself on top of a hill looking at the sea while the wind, in a soft but uncoordinated waltz, brings the remnants of a day that should be forgotten. It is then that, still in the trance of the moment, the spectator begins to feel the breeze swaying his hair while his thoughts immerse themselves in the memory of a specific moment that suddenly makes the dammed tears begin to flow down his cheeks. Not by chance, there is in Au Confort De La Memoire Qui Sublime a generous sprinkling of nostalgia that captures the audience and puts them in perfect tune with the melodic energy. With its medieval romps, Au Confort De La Memoire Qui Sublime confirms its emotional and melodramatic character, making it the numbing ballad of La Civilisation De La Graine.
The melody that dawns is almost like an energetic medley from Au Confort De La Memoire Qui Sublime. After all, its soft, slightly weepy introduction makes the listener begin to make a fluid transition into the new storyline that begins. The strategy is a necessary one, as the song suddenly collapses into a rappy, rhythmic, rhythmic groove. However, this atmosphere fits well with the context of Assemblée Populaire, because its sonority makes the listener see himself in a kind of claiming meeting exposing his worldviews and his dissatisfactions as a citizen. It is curious, but it even gives the impression of something directed to the people themselves and not to wealthy institutions. For this reason, it can be said that Assemblée Populaire functions as a kind of soundtrack of the French left-wing strand that wants to bring down the one who sold himself as the candidate of the center Emmanuel Macron, who disappointed countless voters by reducing the wealth tax of the wealthiest.
It is at night. Candle lighting highlights a wheel in which several people are seated and holding hands while enveloped in a virgin forest. Onomatopoeic and vocal chants begin to create a mystical, almost religious atmosphere to the scene. However, as the bass takes up its position in a provocative way, this sense of spirituality is lost, so that the true intentions become evident. And it is with the intention of causing a paradigm shift that the melody takes on a remarkable critical sense with the guitar and drums. As the longest track on La Civilisation De La Graine, La Spiritualite Marketing, as its name suggests, criticizes and rejects the way politics wins over voters with false postures and misleading catchphrases. For this reason, and even if it has a milder language, La Spiritualite Marketing enters in the same spectrum as Assemblée Populaire in the scope of criticism of the political system in force in the country.
Serious, brutal, and harsh, the sonority even astonishes the listener by the bold distancing with the standard progressive clothing. More metallic, the melody transits between disorder and a false sense of social organization. With dissonant and disharmonious sounds, M'Z's intention to build a critical environment becomes clear when inserting, between the metal lines, flirtations with noise and stoner rock. It is interesting to notice that, in this process, Bureaucratie Be Mol is responsible for forming the political trinity of La Civilisation De La Graine, for along with Assemblée Populaire and La Spiritualite Marketing it closes the dialogue of discontent positioning in relation to current policies and presents, in certain rhythmic bridges of apparent calmness, the cynicism and congressional debauchery in relation to the yearnings of society. It is interesting to note that even the song's nomenclature indicates such interpretations. Be Mol, in the musical context, suggests more serious sounds, and when you add the word 'bureaucracy', you already have the slight idea that the song will approach the bureaucratic concept in a critical way, which in fact happens.
It is like the winds of change. The air of hope. The motivational energy. The timid dissipation of insecurity. With softness and lightness, the melody presents a blues base that softens the ears of the spectator who is still stunned by the brutality of Bureaucratie Be Mol. While the guitars end up working as a kind of morphine, it is the broken and slightly accelerated beat of the drums that imputes consciousness to the listener. Enquete Payenne, by its title, can suggest to be as much about bribery and corruption as the paycheck itself. It is here, between melodic verses of intoxicating melancholy, that M'Z invites the listener to reflect on the wage gap and the monetary priorities that the government pays more attention to. Perhaps this is why Enquete Payenne is adorned with a reflective and, at the same time, sad and tearful sound.
Dense, precise, serious and with a strong groove. The introductory melody makes the song that is born have a strong stylistic kinship with Bureaucratie Be Mol. Metalized, it has synchronous guitars in low riffs and a very present and well marked rhythm drum that has in the double bass drum the symbol of its tempo. Even with an initially linear sound, the rhythmic structure manages to make the listener's blood boil, the pupils dilate, the fists close and the head start to shake in melodic time. As a scenic ambience, the listener finds himself in the midst of rubble and sparks that burn the rest of the wreckage. The sky is dark and filled with lightning that, with its flashes, terrifies anyone who dares to walk in the open air. But at the center of it all is a cynically satisfied looking woman dancing a clumsy monologue waltz. She is Ishtar, the Greek goddess of war revering the disastrous and butchering results of bellicosity. In the midst of so many arms disputes occurring simultaneously on the planet, such as the Ukraine War, the Syrian War, and the ongoing war conflicts in countries like Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Haiti, and Afghanistan, Ishtar Dance, while sounding like a provocation to the leaders of the nations that finance such events, becomes a warning about the social consequences that such situations can bring about.
It is interesting and at the same time curious when a purely sonorous work can become something audiovisual to the unconscious and intimate eyes of the listener. Even more interesting is when an instrumental album manages to achieve this feat. La Civilisation De La Graine is an example of this and with a detail to add: the melodies work as complete verses that verbalize the whole concept behind the album, which is popular dissatisfaction.
Through progressive melodies that embrace other rock subgenres such as metal, hardcore, stoner rock, noise rock, jazz, blues and hard rock, the album walks through an abundant political atmosphere full of criticism of the governmental measures in place in France. Wage and salary issues, monetary issues, and issues that call into question the priorities of a government that claims to be of the center are some of the issues perfectly verbalized in every chord, note, or groove you hear.
Not coincidentally, La Civilisation De La Graine is marked by a group of politicized songs made up of titles such as Assemblée Populaire, La Spiritualite Marketing, Bureaucratie Be Mol and Enquete Payenne. Each of these compositions helps to amplify the uprising atmosphere proposed by M'Z.
However, the album also brings delicacies translated into reflective, melancholic, and nostalgic melodic sceneries that invite the listener to look around and, mainly, to his or her own interior and dialogue with the deepest and most painful memories. This is the case of the ballad Au Confort De La Memoire Qui Sublime.
To synthesize all these conflicting and even disturbing thoughts, Mathieu Torres, responsible for all the instrumentation of the album, also took care of the production and mixing. It was in these roles that he immersed himself in a contemplative, analytical, and sensitive state to let the sound speak for itself. For this, the mix, in particular, would have to be flawless, which it was. In it, all sounds are in perfect equalization while the production helped close the rhythmic concept.
Closing the scope of La Civilisation De La Graine comes the cover art. Signed by Stéphanie Artaud, it already communicates the concept of class with a mixture of witch hunts for illustrating the execution of those who think differently. Coming from an album of significant political weight, such a piece says a lot about protest, heterogeneity of thought, and fighting for the right to have one's dissatisfactions heard by the owners of power. An interesting point of the drawing in question is the sky that adorns the black and white landscape. Full of rounded and circular shapes identified by dotted lines, it shows a great influence of Van Gogh, especially his work Starry Night.
Released on 06/24/2022 via Luminol Records, La Civilisation De La Graine is an album that gives voice to much of the restlessness and dissatisfaction of the French people. It is a work that, above all, distorts the maxim that a picture is worth a thousand words. After all, each rhythmic corner works as a socio-political book full of opinion.
