Album Review

The Moi Non Plus – The Moi Non Plus

• 23rd Oct 2009

Europe has a mixed record on being at the forefront. The French with Air, Daft punk and new-House mixed in with Hallyday, sophisticated Italy also breeding entire shrill goth symphonic opera-baiting subcultures, Croatian fusion- metal jazz culturally jammed next to tinny euro-pop and mullet-burdened soft metal.

Frankly, Dutch duo Moi Plus Non straddle both sides of this schzio continental characteristic. Theirs is the type of pared-down tool-fitted abrasive and yet slippery art-rock which is the cool sound of 2001 and 2011 alike, within it shards of Sonic Youth’s alt- verse of perennial noise-core and anti-anthems. Yet it also sounds lagged on the tails of 2003, with its post-Faint Spartan death-funk evoking Liars and all those kindred scowling vibes of that displaced underground launched all over the VJ afternoon listings for kids that never got beyond the Strokes.

Right from the off, these ‘me neithers’ keep things lean and unostentatious, teetering melodically between a honed machine electro- tribalism and buzzer- skeleton post funk. At worst with a (half) baked larrisitude that suggests the band leaving a metronome-program to auto- compose over a woozy long lunch.

Ha-ha starts off atonal, careering keyboards fading in over a raw Spartan drum track until the bass plumes around the beats, but it feels like dressing twigs and calling them sculptures. ‘I lie’ follows the old post-punk template; Joy Division to TNV of near-steel primal drums and thin industrial shards of guitar spread over the beat. So far, so stock; ‘Jil Sander’ starts off in similar vein, low-drones see—sawing over a echo-chamber complaint, and . But like all good dance music-it builds its heart around on layers vertical and lateral building and revealing themselves, and like all good electroclash, hardcore –aping tempo switches and synchs echoing the nerve-binding acoustics of breakdowns.

Then from on Moi Non Plus play up the chancer-experimentalist schizophrenia with their anonymous near-joke titles colliding with unexpected aural avenues and visible technical smarts in their slickly self-produced mixes. Punchy cuts like ‘What if we do it’ with its title refrain and ‘beautiful face’ rhymes especially play the art-school abstract-dumb-pop thrill balance card, teetering between sing-along’s and oblivion into a violent gallery music. Unusually forthright vocals at the forefront of ‘Where is everything’ melt into bursts of warm psych-sound; two eastern strands- the atonal middle-eastern and the shimmering orient fight against each other, at cryogenic speeds with de-tuned divisions of Hook-lines, 1980 Closer era. And ‘I’ve got the heart’ brings in the heartache in an off-key register at war again with an intruding major-chord switch which pushes against the sadness in one of the Non plus’s most developed melodies. Consolation in confident high-mix harmonies becomes yells and screams against the wrapping melody which ripples and fades encircling him and there in the background like crazed seagull attacks, ambient noise becomes spiked glass. But at its tail snaps ‘Johnny’ like a bar-room mutant son of the Stooges, bratty and caterwauling on the road to nowhere.

Just to confuse—or reiterate—the central theme, events turn more ambient and Ambien alike on the weird and woolly final trio of tracks.’ ‘Sudden Impact’ hangs around on spaced-out roofed up vibes for 2.30 minutes in what used to be called glacial, until Moi Non Plus suddenly jerk into a brittle reedy C83 style eighties anti-melody jingles assaulted by industrial-sized samples from an army gym in electro-terror land, all crackling samples, cogs and robo-voices. I Want It’ remains in the same melange, but adopts a straight up pile-driving shoe-gaze effect akin to dusk forest road driving in the frost with smothered cries from a low-tuned punk noise drawing into contrast against the wilderness. ‘Wake-Up’ remains in a skip of oblique sounds until it hits the Sonic Youth trail, with counter-harmonies allied to a strange rock and roll forward drive, creeping bass-lines threaten to just rock-out but instead get wrapped in twisting tangled notes like toffee spiderwebs.

So—on balance, a recommendation, even if it’s all too diffuse and quotation-marked to really move you from within.