Diagonale des Yeux: Madeleine review – Strange multilingual pop with quieter moments | music

TThe lyrics to Diagonale des Yeux’s debut album were written in the style of a brilliant corpse game, with members Laurène Exposito and Théo Delaunay taking turns piecing together ephemeral ideas and themes in a mixture of French, German, English and Spanish. The whimsical, multilingual stories that emerge are matched by the French duo’s ramshackle, home-recorded sound, which features everything from toy box percussion to farmyard sound effects.

Their eccentric style is grounded in 1980s European outsider pop and post-punk, which embraced dissonant instrumentation and disaffected vocals. These 12 tracks are charming lo-fi music, built on primitive synth riffs and guitar riffs that often go in strange directions. The Acolytes jump from frenetic punk jam to sudden breakdown and back again in the space of just a few minutes 90 seconds; Le Rayon Orchidée stumbles lurching to a halt like a malfunctioning music box. They both sing, which adds to the theatrical performance: they play with the effects, ranging from kitten-like meows to masculine meows. Groans.

At times, the silliness feels a bit cloying, as on the rickety opening track Tie Game, or the story of Baby Budh gone wrong with time, but that feeling is offset by the record’s quieter, less gimmicky moments. Tracks like Hills of Love and Paradise have a simple, almost melancholic mystery, while Nana Niña is reminiscent of upbeat, mechanical music. Binaries from the Minith Synth Group Deux. Elsewhere, the duo channel the Martin Rev on drum machine singer Cherry Ann, and the Corgis on Change Your Heart, twisting their 1980 hit “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” into a harsh, snappy chillwave. But like the rest of this topsy-turvy release, these references are delivered with a knowing smile rather than pretense.

Also out this month

In Filth, Your Mystery is the Kingdom / Far Smile Peasant in Yellow Music, the self-released debut album by the Nicaraguan-American musician Dagmar Zunigareceived a high-profile reissue (93AD). It’s a groovy, raw set in which Zuniga’s smooth, high voice wanders coyly around bold guitars and patchwork synths. The mysterious, tape-recorded intimacy evokes grouper and Vashti Bunyan. Laurel Hello He provides the soundtrack to Midnight Zone, a film by French-Swiss conceptual artist Julien Charrière that explores a remote area of ​​the Pacific Ocean increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining (Awe). Much like the dark, swirling images that accompany them, these dense, epic, resonant compositions are intermittently soothing and occasionally unnerving. Una Teoría del Ritmo is the brilliant new record from the Valencia-based electronic group Mechanics Classica (Abstrakce): Nine gorgeous downtempo tracks, with bubbling beats and flowing beats adding a warm, lively kick to the swampy foundations.