Lord Auch - To The Shit House (Young and Lost Club)
Huw Jones | Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Since his death in 1962, the unintentional philosopher Georges Bataille has inspired academics and musicians alike, Bjork, of Montreal and Mark Gardener to name just a few. Yet like many forward thinkers, his work was largely shunned, ignored and mocked by his contemporaries, including a certain Jean-Paul Sartre, leading our man Georges to experiment with the black art of pseudonymity.
On such pseudonymous publication, dismissed as nothing more than cheap pornography, was Histoire de l'oeil, or for all the monolinguals out there Story of the Eye, a literary work dealing with teenage perversions and sexual experimentation. Bataille chose to publish this novella under the pseudonym Lord Auch, auch being short for "aux chiottes", slang for "to the shithouse". Band and EP name effortlessly explained, history lesson over, this review is ready to go.
The recently bolstered five-piece, formed among the gentrified shadows of London's East End are, once you get past the Nick Cave comparisons, a breath of fresh unsettling air described as paranoid pop. If the idea of Johnny Cash dressed as Elvis, presiding over a drive in Las Vegas themed funeral is your idea of popular paranoia, then the paranoid pop description is bang on.
Either way, this is a band that demands the same nervous attention as the palatial squalor of a gin palace cum crack den. Crafted from beneath a cloak of opiated malaise, 'Sapphp And Doubleskin' aches with pained acoustic knowledge, the deep croaking vocals spelling out their intent by accompanying the damned and the doomed that dare dance the 'Drunkards Rigadoon' through one dank alley, and any number of clattering accentuated echoes, to the next.
Conventionally unconventional, 'Painter Of Everything' and 'To The Shithouse' are dark, strained and delving hair pricking extensions of the preceding two tracks, but unlike fashionista pop, Lord Auch, despite their macabre approach, are not malevolent isolationists intent on creating cochlea induced nightmares, but by the same token, their Machiavellian sound doesn't invite external creative criticism.
Bataille might have died before his work was fully acknowledged, with any luck the same fate wont befall Lord Auch and the spoils of their refreshingly single-minded sound.
Rating: 3/5