Artist: Turzi
Title: A
Genre: Too Cool For School
Label: Kemado
Year: 2007
Bitrate/Source: 192AvgVBR/Thank you slsk donor!



Holy fucking hell is all I can say about this one.
Incredible stuff imo, for fans of everything from 
the clinic to the cramps to alien sex fiend to 70s 
italian movie soundtracks, this thing rocks. 
fantastic innovative stuff from the french, and 
props to pitchforkmedia.com for actually 
recognizing some real innovative music.  This made 
for some incredibly fun late night driving this 
past evening...Here's pitchfork's intriguing take 
on the album:
\


Whatever stereotypes you have reserved for French 
music acts, five-piece Turzi probably won't meet 
any of them. Handpicked by Air for their Record 
Makers label, where Turzi released their Made Under
Authority EP in 2005, the band shares little in 
common with its more prominent compatriots. You 
won't find the techno bombast of Daft Punk or 
Justice, the sultry bedroom orchestrations of Air, 
or even the coke-dusted 1980s electro of Kavinsky.
Instead, Turzi infuse A with a litany of austere, 
cerebral European sounds meant to accompany primary
songwriter Romain Turzi's vision quest through 
history. 

Attila the Hun, Mozart, and Jesus Christ, among 
other historical celebs, receive shout-outs amidst 
a sensory overload of krautrock, psych, and 
shoegaze. Says Turzi in the band's press release, 
"Music, whether you are initiated in it or not, 
should make you have the same sensations as doing 
drugs," and despite the homogenized tracklist 
(every song begins with the letter "a"), the album 
strives to keep the listener chemically out of 
whack. Unlike the gradual, ecstasy-friendly build 
of techno, Turzi's heady motorik establishes steady
\ beats and chants that burn hot but briefly. On 
"Are You Thinking About Jesus?", Turzi muses that 
"Jesus had never seen a dancefloor," yet he 
prematurely pulls the plug on this swelling maxim 
as if he never has either. 

While A flaunts a cultured blend of musical genres,
Turzi's penchant for kitschy film score tropes 
serves as the glue holding the whole thing 
together. Besides the obvious Can or Silver Apples 
references, Turzi cites Hollywood composers like 
Ennio Morricone as major influences, a connection 
that quickly becomes apparent just a few tracks in.
Tracks like "Alpes" or "Afghanistan" open according
to the stoic German template, with subtle but 
skull-piercing guitar droning over a rudimentary 
drum part on the verge of Chinese water torture, 
the whole system immaculately interlocked and 
seemingly interminable. Quickly, though, the 
ascetic loses out to the aesthetic, the taut kraut 
drones slouch into dark surf-guitar riffs, and 
Turzi's deep vocals inject a James Dean-like 
coolness into the song's unfeeling machinery. 

However, A proves more than the extra butter on 
your action movie's popcorn. Just as any of these 
obsessive numbers can simultaneously explode into 
scene-stealing theatrics, so too can they get 
caught in a mind-melting feedback loop. "Attila 
Blues" starts eerily similar to A's more dramatic 
tracks, though Turzi reins in his breathy vocals, 
emulating Suicide's ability to reconcile clanging, 
anti-climactic repetition with warm-blooded Elvis 
crooning. Ironically, a topographically-challenged 
track like this adds more entertainment value than 
a dozen show-stopping themes strung together ever 
could. Nowhere on A does Turzi craft something 
wholly original or unpredictable on its own, but 
sequentially each track puts enough of a twist on 
its predecessor to keep this strung-out blockbuster
score intriguing.