Rien Virgule Le Couronnement des Silex

Catalogue Number : ZZ057 - https://zamzamrec.bandcamp.com/album/le-couronnement-des-silex
“For factual purposes, you might wish to know that Rien Virgule come from southwestern France, but by all accounts it's as useful to think of them as nomadic. The four-piece – Jean-Marc Reilla, Manuel Duval, Anne Careil and Mathias Pontévia – released their debut album Trente Jour À Grande Échelle in 2015 and toured prodigiously, planting their giallo-goth synthprog flag in the haphazard French out-rock underground. Le Couronnement des Silex takes the band no closer to any sort of scene based context but it's an alluring deep dive in it's own right the five songs are intense, glowering creations that feel like the aural equivalent of a death stare. Pontévia's drums, loose yet insistent like a depunked version of Budgie in The Banshees, butt heads with Careil's ice-solemn vocal and a glut of synths. It's hard to ascertain who's playing what part, with Reilla, Duval and Careil sharing credit for the latter, but they vary from church organ creeepers (“Zanne Neil Velluto”, “LaVisite Aux Animaux Plâtrés”) to juts and judders of circuit-bent flotsam (“Tactail”, found at a most enjoyable nexus of Goblin, Portishead and Throbbing !gristle) to haughty spacerock sweeps (“Mariage Des Pôles”). “La Peau Noire” opens with dub bass and morphs into a psychedelic punk dervish over its eight minutes. When Careil pitches her vocal up and the keyboards are jostling for position, the results are something like The Residents soundtracking a funeral. Le Couronnement des Silex, though, goes beyond its arguable touchstones and marks Rien Virgule out as a fine, strinking and unpigeonholeable entity which could and should find an audience beyond the French DIY network. The deathly pall the band cast here has a tragic postcript however. Reilla, who built his own synths and also played in avant garde orchestra Un, died a few weeks after the release of this album. If it's to be Rien Virgule's last, they go out in black clad style."
Text by Noel Gardner