COCHONNE - Self-Titled
There is too much noise.
Even if you pay no mind to the endless circus of sour thoughts that plague modern life, I still feel that longing desire for... anything but noise. I mean, true noiselessness is just a farce anyways, I know that. I bury my fingertips into my ears and am immediately met with the lingering sounds of my internal dialing tone: tinnitus. Nothing but this horrible, ever-present ringing that penetrates the silence with an obnoxious consistency. This idea of total "stillness", or... "serenity" -- if you wish to think with romantic idealism --, is just a fantasy. There will always be too much noise, always an excess of mental stimuli. There is no "off" switch for that. But... there is a way for me to trip the circuit breaker, if momentary.
That is where a group like Cochonne comes in. This is a North Carolinian punk band whose name -- being a vulgar, derogatory French term often oriented towards women -- should be indicative of the group's contemplative nature at best, and their non-conformist irreverency at worst. But either way, Cochonne's intelligent artfulness is something that effectively shines through the group's controlled usage of negative space in their songwriting, darkening their soundscapes through controlled spasms of post-punk articulations. Cochonne's minimalist instrumentation, operating solely through hushed plucks, picks, and strokes that carelessly flirt with the lines separating "post" and "pop", provides a sonic placidity that I struggle to find elsewhere. It's heavily abstracted from normalized musical ideals, with disoriented percussion segments jittering in the background with a nervous energy, irregular time signatures becoming the regular as they accompany the ominous, cyclical basslines that heavily discolor the foreground, driving the songs forward with a ragged, bare-bones charm. The delicate organ resonances, jagged, crusted guitar riffs, and dissonant lead melodies scramble for cogency in this poetic affair, with silence frequently being used to emphasize instrumental convulsions otherwise left understated. The echoed vocal chants, reciting long-winded choruses with a ditzy, almost-playful-like whimsicality, accentuates Cochonne's sound with a uniquely... "cavernous" feel, which is certainly at odds with the fragile, bony consistency of the musicianship surrounding it. If anything, the songs can sometimes feel a little claustrophobic, its tonal smallness working against itself in an anxiety-inducing way. But... that's exactly what I'm looking for with a band like this.
There is too much noise. There's no undoing that. But the non-complex complexity of Cochonne's tribal, dreamlike post-punk is surely enough to stupefy, and stupefaction is about as close as I can get to noiselessness. Thinking hasn't done me much good anyways.
TRACK LIST:
Omega - 0:00
Horrorscope - 1:27
Mensonge Humain - 3:15
I Don't Wanna - 6:19
Body Bag - 8:57
F21 - 11:46
21:35
SUPPORT: https://cochonne.bandcamp.com/releases
https://sorrystaterecords.bandcamp.co...
DOWNLOAD: https://www.mediafire.com/file/48koqt...