Track of the Week: Les Georges Leningrad: Georges Five (2004)

"At heart, Les Georges Leningrad seem like sincere people pretending to be ironic people pretending to be sincere." Pitchfork Media

Les Georges Leningrad are, as clearly as I can make out, a band of assorted French Canadian lunatics masquerading as a pop group - they call their music "petrochemical rock" - no really. Which basically means a mixture of spastic post-punk and joyously deranged No Wave experimentation. The band hide themselves behind numerous ridiculous facades, appearing in masks and giving contradictory and utterly daft replies to interviewer’s questions, which gives them valuable mystique which is hard to maintain in the age of information, but also clouds their motives. So who Poney P (vocals), Mingo (keyboards and guitar) and Bobo Boutin (drums) actually are, and what they are really up to, is anybody’s guess.
‘Georges Five' is their kind-of-theme song from their first album, 'Deux Hot Dog Moutarde Chou' - you couldn't make this up. Whatever I say next cannot possibly convey the sheer deranged oddness of the music, but I'm going to try anyway. Over a shakily played three-note bass-line and drums and atonal keyboard stabs, a woman with a cartoonishly high-pitched voice hollers unintelligibly, as if in great pain. She is joined at various points by a man who also screams incoherently at certain points - a sort of call and response of agony. The instruments are recorded normally, but the voices are recorded well into the red, creating a harsh, unpleasant effect as if both 'singers' were trying to communicate by megaphone over the band and rendering actually deciphering the lyrics - if indeed any actually exist - nigh on impossible. And to cap it all off, there is a fantastically deranged radio transistor solo just to stop things becoming too conventional. The recording is pleasingly lo-fi, and the playful atonality combined with a warped undertone of dread captures the spirit of the original No Wave movement brilliantly - I was genuinely surprised to find out that this was released in 2004 instead of 1979. And whilst you could accuse Les Georges Leningrad of being derivative of this era, it's been a while since I have heard a record so defiantly ugly, yet with a real sense of purpose. Like many of the old No Wave and post-punk bands, Les Georges Leningrad utterly ignore all the conventional rules of popular music, yet if you look hard enough, within their music there is a ruthless logic holding the whole thing together. In short, Les Georges Leningrad sound like Bis being mind-controlled by Cabaret Voltaire in a particularly malevolent mood. And if that's not a recipe for great music then I don't know what is!