It’s a very thin line between true soulful music and pathetic crap. And it’s an even thinner line between catchy (in its best sense) Post Punk and cheesy, super generic indie music. The Swiss outfit LES YEUX SANS VISAGE manages to play dark, emotional and often danceable Post Punk without falling into the latter categories. More often than not you’ll find yourself reminded of super successful acts like Interpol or the early Editors, but LYSV perform in a much more sophisticated way, nearer to the roots of this kind of music – without getting trapped by retromania either. Tomorrow Is A Million Years certainly isn’t a happy debut album, but a very deep and moving one – a journey to the loneliest places inside your heart and soul.
Listen to Oblivion, full review beneath.
The three-piece banks mostly on the classic instrumention, vocals, guitar, bass and drums. A bit of reverb on the guitar, some delay now and then, some e-bowing here and there – that’s basically it. So as much as the sound is reduced to its pure core, as much effort LYSV put into catching and reproducing the overly melancholic mood that is present from the first until the last second of this record.
Like mentioned above, most of songs on Tomorrow Is A Million Years are quite danceable (well, for batcavers at least) and show a decent range of variety – evey single song is highly recognizable and stands out for its own.
Sure enough, a huge part of the listener’s attention focuses on the singer. A band in this vein rises or falls with the singer, his or her voice and presence. And although instruments and vocals are very well balanced on this record, the voice is really extraordinary and outstanding: Somewhere between the early Lou Reed and Adrian Borland of The Sound, a soulful timbre, melancholic, yet maintaining a certain rough undertone.
Enough chitchat: If this record would have been released around 1980, LES YEUX SANS VISAGE would be an absolute überkult-band among Post-Punk and Darkwave afficionados. Given its late birth in 2012, Tomorrow Is A Million Years carries on the tradition of bands like The Sound, Joy Division or early The Beloved. And is no less amazing.
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