PRICE:
$14.50
IN STOCK
ARTIST
TITLE
Prapezam St.
FORMAT
LP

LABEL
CATALOG #
BORNBAD 126LP BORNBAD 126LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
2/5/2021

LP version. Printed under sleeve; includes download. It's not easy mapping Marietta's journey -- one of the key players of the GrandeTriple Alliance De l'Est, an anarchic scene which exploded between Metz and Strasbourg in the early 2000s, fronting bands such as A.H. Kraken, Plastobéton, and The Feeling Of Love. In 2015, he released his first solo album, Basement Dreams Are The Bedroom Cream (BORNBAD 074CD/LP, 2015), an amazing collection of 4-track twisted lullabies who got him comparisons with Syd Barrett and John Frusciante. Then comes his second LP and suddenly, no more of that sweet demo sounding folky weirdness: La Passagère (BORNBAD 097CD/LP, 2017) was recorded in Los Angeles with Chris Cohen and it's a lush and mesmerizing record. Richer and fuller than the two previous records, Prazepam St. is also, paradoxically, unabashed and easier to grasp. "I wanted to have fun," says Marietta. "Build a dark and bright world with my little hands and raw material, like David Lynch when he did Eraserhead" -- one of the main keys to the album. It is also, more involuntarily a synthesis -- there's the raw side of the first album, that more flamboyant and ambitious of the second, but also small pieces of AH Kraken, Feeling Of Love and even Funk Police. Marietta went back to some of his teenage years favorite records -- Sonic Youth, Beck, Nirvana, the Beastie Boys, but also Jim O'Rourke or David Pajo. Prazepam St. is also a dark and twisted record, as its title shows -- a reference to an anxiolytic used for severe depression. "I have often tried to speak in my lyrics of the way the human mind works, of our contradictions, of our inner darkness," explains Marietta. "And this time I wanted to bring the lexical field of drugs into my texts. Our body and mind are shaped by these substances that we use and abuse and I wanted to play with that. It's a chemical album." Proof made with "DMPA", a molecule used as a chemical castrator on American sex offenders, transformed here into a battered folk song crushed by samples, rhythm machines and breaks from outer space. Or "Aluminum", a solid and shiny but highly harmful element, like the incandescent ride full of rumbling synths, which opens the album.