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ZITA SWOON
Life = A Sexy Sanctuary
8/10
The centre point of Zita Swoon music are the existential dilemma of Stef
Kamil Carlens: his choice of androgyny as a condition at the same time
ideal and problematic. It's the puzzle that guides his lyrics an vocal
design between perversion an innocence, fury and discouragement, between
torment and state of grace. The same mental excitement is found in Marc
Almond, who projected his ambiguity theatre in a electronic cabaret. The
difference is that Kamil and Zita Swoon choose electric music, taking
the option on a twisted and complex sound, like a inverted recreation
of Glam Rock, leading to the counter-natural fusion of T-Rex sensuality
with the convulsive blues rock of Captain Beefheart. In "I Paint Pictures
On A Wedding Dress" that unusual hybrid shaped into fluid songs, ballads
of acoustic tone developed in complex arrangements. "Life = A Sexy Sanctuary"
tends to be a more accessible album, not fading away from the pastiche
of the popsong. But if it is true that these ten new songs are more structure,
it is also true that the whirl of ideas did not became less effective.
At the beginning of the record, and in particular in the single "Hot Hotter
Hottest", there's a conjugation of rock guitar riffs and new wave rhythm
that are familiar and potentially radiofriendly, the same applies to the
epic tone ballads that closes the record. But in these songs as in other
there's a permanent ambience of sudden surprise and fickleness which thickens
and make songs more complex, subtracting the at least advertised or intended
pop lightness.
Listening to this
record from the first to the last song and without great investment, it
sounds like an uninhabitable record eventually unpleasant. But has we
go through it discovering things it offers a sensation of strange beauty
at the same time delicate and thorny. Which is , nevertheless the resonant
counterpart of the paradox that is androgyny in the version of Zita Swoon
frontman.
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submitted and translated by JOSE POLIDO
