EAT-GIRLS

Area Silenzio is eat-girls' debut record and it is both haunted and haunting. For the past four years, the French trio have been crafting their songs into little self-contained worlds with the patience of entomologists, taking them out all over the country and Europe to confront them with the wilderness of a live audience. The ten resulting tracks are a collection of electronic madrigals, groove-driven songs played on a mischievous multi-speed Victrola, ranging from languid dub drips to full-on drum machine cavalcades.

Their live performances have that same ghostly, ephemeral quality. There is something other-worldy about the three of them, a suggestion of telepathy, their three voices blending together or going their separate ways like a flock of starlings. They secured opening slots with artists as different as Thalia Zedek, Exek and The Young Gods, just to name a few. It is the elusive essence of their music that allows them to feel at ease pretty much anywhere they find themselves: part no-wave disco rhythms, part post-punk throbbing basses, folk tunes and synthesizers in equal measures, with a perpetual attention to hooks and melodies.

The album was self-recorded, a necessary measure to protect the delicate nature of the inner landscapes painted by the band. In this case 'delicate' does not mean 'soft' by any means: the industrial disco inferno of 'A Kin', the ritualistic kraut stampede of 'Para Los Pies Cansados' and the bubbly post-funk rhythms of 'Trauschaft' will leave you gasping for air once you come out on the other side. 'On a Crooked Swing', the opener, is all arpeggiated bass and stumbling kicks. 'Unison' will dip you into a hallucinatory river where nothing is what it seems to be and rescue you at the very last second. 'Canine', the first single off the record, will gently but firmly reach for your jugular with its vulpine Farfisa and deceptively nonchalant drum beat. The vocal polyphonies on '3 Omens' sound like a field recording of traditional music from a tiny country that has yet to be discovered.

eat-girls exist on a slightly different plane from ours, where everything is teeming with secrets and hidden life. Area Silenzio is a precious polaroid shot from that world, or, as Tom Verlaine would have it, 'a souvenir from a dream'.

Sebastien Perrin