So, there you are minding your own business when you get hit by some French band doing the avant rock thing with a dash of the four on the floor dancefloor thrown in and, if you look at the label on the rock filled tin that just bounced off your head, then you will see that the album is called “Sparkles & Mud” and the band is called Parquet.
There are no words - of course – so it is all in the beats and the rhythm and Parquet - Seb Brun, Nicolas Cueille, Guillaume Magne, Jean-François Riffaud, Simon Henocq, Clément Édouard, and Julien Desprez - lay down some downright neo-industrial rhythms. Their musical sensibilities do also suggest a familiarity with the electronically enhanced rigidity of the dancefloor of the nineties but this isn’t disco as much as the ghost of techno after said ghost has gone for some serious music lessons. This album isn’t therefore the work of a sequencer and a drum machine as, despite the use of repletion to reinforce the sonic impact, everything seems far too urgent to be the work of a computer with those angular post punk guitar motifs providing the punctuation that makes it all artistically accessible.
There isn’t emotional subtlety or, indeed, even disguised sensitivity for it is undoubetdly the Parquet way to turn songs into metal clad sonic trains that aren’t going to stop until they get to their destination. That’s an almost academic approach to music making yet it is also one that makes both mind and body move and, as the style setters might say, this album goes straight from dusk to dawn.