Débruit - Outside The Line

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  • The imaginary land that Xavier Thomas references on his fourth solo album as Débruit—"where ancient West Africa cohabits with '80s New York"—isn't uncharted territory. David Byrne first travelled there on his 1981 collaboration with Brian Eno, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, which melded Afrobeat rhythms and early sampling techniques with Talking Heads' jerky funk. More recently—and further east in Democratic Republic Of Congo—Mbongwana Star dropped post-punk guitars and spiky bass into the eclectic stew of African and American influences on From Kinshasa, one of this year's most thrilling albums. Even Thomas himself has previously dabbled in African sounds, both on 2013's collaboration with Sudanese singer Alsarah, Aljawal, and "Nigeria What?" from 2010's Spatio-Temporel EP. On the French producer's From The Horizon LP, the continent was just one of myriad global influences. If From The Horizon made Thomas seem to have perennially itchy feet, Outside The Line sees him resting them for a spell. The rhythms are much more linear and less spasmodic, the sounds more relaxed. The proto-house house of "Shock" is his most conventional dance floor cut to date: its serpentine bassline is adorned by little more than a few squeaky synths, and it's all the better for it. The ricocheting echoes in tracks like "Synthetic Dust" suggest that Thomas' biggest musical touchstone these days might be Jamaican dub. The percussive roll of "Transverse" brings to mind Nozinja’s Shangaan electro, but most of the obvious African signifiers—like the sampled chants on "Separated Together"—seem designed simply to add a splash of colour to the synthetic sounds. Outside The Line is slickly produced, but its distorted guitars have the same lo-fi feel as bands like Konono No.1; the way some of the synths wobble sound like they've been plugged into the wavering power supply of an African metropolis. Outside The Line is a temporal trip as well as a geographical one. The analogue synths in "Separated Together" and "Stand Up" not only sound like John Carpenter, but disorient like a sci-fi time machine gone haywire. The album's psychedelia comes from the way sounds seem to bend around the edges—there's a faint seasickness to the guitars and stumbling organ on "Percute." It all makes Outside The Line a heady brew worth diving into.
  • Tracklist
      01. Drift 02. Separated Together 03. Stand Up 04. Shock 05. Percute 06. Transverse 07. Desert Dream 08. Dundun 09. MZB 10. Synthetic Dust 11. AM AM
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