Pamplemousse: Porcelain
LP | CD | DL
Out now
French grunge-garage noisniks Pamplemousse return with Porcelain, a fuzz-drenched alt-rock blast that envelops the senses.
On their new album, French duo Pamplemousse seem primed to unleash a driving frenzy of grunge-soaked garage-psych, battering your senses right from the off with the visceral opener More Beautiful Than Madonna. It ticks all the right boxes, with its pounding drums and searing guitar wailing through the hot and sticky distortion. As singer/guitarist Nico has stated, “post grunge somewhere between RL Burnside, Unsane and George Michael.” We’ll take that. But what transpires seems more a paused rumination, one through which the band take their time to relish the dense fuzz that they envelop themselves in.
After three albums as a trio, now paired down to a duo with Nico joined by Sarah behind the skins, they have no problem filling the expanse with a haze of delicious post-Sabbath, drones of fuzz that drop into sparse builds, and tense breaks. Although the tracks don’t always rocket along, there is a tension, the doubled vocals adding at times to a feeling of angst on songs like Every Story Has An End.
However, on tracks like The Big Speakers and Bad Penny, they do pick up the pace somewhat, recalling those bands at the tail end of the 90s that harked back half a decade or so to the Pacific Northwest sound. For a band that hailed from Reunion Island, theirs could be the sounds of a summer cyclone, filtered through the wind and rain – chaotic, cathartic, and controlled. Whether their recent relocation to Lorraine has an impact on their outlook remains to be seen, but for now this is certainly a great new find.
Porcelain by Pamplemousse is available on Bandcamp.
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Words by Nathan Whittle. Find his Louder Than War archive here.
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