Mama Rosin
Album: Bye Bye Bayou
Label: Moi J' Connais
Tracks: 13
Website: http://www.mamarosin.com/

Crazed Swiss punk-swamp combo Mama Rosin have made a series of primally warped albums that have taken them from feral zydeco and garage voodoo, and over the past few years their uncompromising live act has been the stuff of legend. Now has come the time to translate that visceral experience to CD, and left-field American rocker Jon Spencer has taken up the challenge and positioned himself at the helm for the band's latest studio creation, on which they've taken punk and cajun by the roots and ripped up the rulebooks in no uncertain terms.

The music on this CD may take even the band's own staunchest fans by surprise, for, while it signals a conscious evolution from the raw, wild, in-yer-face alchemy of the guys' previous albums by conjuring its own kind of weird bad-ass magic through fuzzed, admirably heavily distorted and grungified noise in a kind of aural soup that obeys only its own arcane laws, cranking those amps way up high in the process of course.

From the muzzily incandescent Memphis-garage-rock'n'roll of Marilou and the explosively heavy Damned-style riffing of Sorry Ti Monde, with bursts of moody psychedelic cajun (Paraît Qu'y A Pas L' Temps and You Broke My Stuffs) and thrash cajun (Bye Bye Birdy Black part 2) and an excursion into the Green River bayou (Black Samedi) along the way, this is a bit like taking a tour with the band through the landscapes and locations of their touring (if you get the drift) - there's even a song about the Essex outpost of Wivenhoe (which incidentally pays homage to the Beastie Boys and Rick Rubin), while Mama Don't is a haunting slice of psych-blues audibly inspired by the droning weirdnesses of Jesse Mae Hemphill and the VU and Seco E Molhado takes a sleepy banjo tune into the scary realms of True Blood.

I also rather liked the rather uncharacteristically sad I Don't Feel At Home, and the disc's mournful closing homage to Leonard Cohen (don't ask!), but arguably the strangest cut of them all, though, is the seriously warped clanking French-language shuffle through Assis Sur Le Sommet Du Monde. All adding up to 35 minutes of glorious noise, and a crazily fitting support act for Bellowhead on their upcoming tour (dead sure to give the Boden Boys some ideas!)…

David Kidman