♫♪  Hinin - Noyés

Oh, you don’t have to explain it to me, I totally get it: everything coming from France is better, for some reason, it’s just a matter of well-understood fact. There are the obvious cultural exports that I won’t bother you with (for fear of reducing French exports to a caricature, even though they’re so good!), but maybe one that gets overlooked a little too much is the music. Over the past year or so I’ve received a surprising amount of French-language promos, and the quality has ranged from “fun” to “super fun.” That spectrum makes sense when you realize that much of what arrives over the transom turns out to be garage and post-punk EPs. From France! (I exclaim, still in a mild state of disbelief.)

Hyperactive razor-slash post-punk duo Hinin is among the exports, as Anto and Pierre wrap their undoubtedly skinny and tightly sleeved (the French are always impeccably tailored) arms around four adorably propulsive songs and give them a nice big hug. Think Iceage meets Echo and the Bunnymen by way of Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, if you can possibly imagine such a beast. Sung in French, which is a total plus for me (because lyrics can ruin a song so easily), the tracks on Noyés barrel past, and before you know it, the tape is over, and that look you had before pressing play returns to your face, the one where the idiot grin slowly lowers to a frown as you realize the sounds that were making you so happy have stopped. C’est tellement triste!

The remedy? Press play again, of course.

Also, maybe you should take a quick look around you — I’d completely ransacked my own office in gleeful abandon for fourteen straight minutes while listening to Noyés — all those overdriven guitars and drums put me in a whirling destructive trance. You might also have some cleaning up to do.

Meaning Noyés gets a hearty “super fun” from me!

Cassette is out on Et mon cul c’est du tofu (haha, sure guys, your “tul” is certainly “tofu”!), while the CD hails from Medication Time. I have the cassette, which I would hug too if I wasn’t a human-speech-emulating bot composed of lines of computer code. Besides, I’ve gotten too fat to wear tight shirts anymore.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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