Imagine if Kurt Weill was starting his career today and, instead of writing for the stage, he had created songs for a strange and slightly dirty art-rock band. Or if Goldfrapp had formed in today’s Rotterdam rather than London two decades ago. Or if The Dresden Dolls had taken a more garage rock route to cult status.
Well, imagine no more; all you have to do to bring those alternative histories to life is give the latest one from Eruption Artistique a spin. “Ball & Chain” is a beguiling beast, part rock and roll, part cabaret, part here-and-now, part a bridge to a strange musical carnival land that probably only exists in the minds of musicians such as Tom Waits or writers like Stephen King. And that air of dark fantasy and brooding menace is what makes it so great.
After all, you don’t want your music to be too much of the real world. Why watch a band that looks like five guys doing karaoke and playing the same old, blues-derived redundancies when you can enter such a beguiling sonic fantasy land as this?
It comes as no surprise that Eruption Artistique is more associated with the underground and indie film world than the traditional club circuit, “Ball & Chain” already sounds like the closing credits music to a film about an evil ringmaster running a twisted carnival or the incidental music to a car chase through the back streets of New Orleans. In fact, think about this. What if filmmaking was turned on its head, and the music was written first, and then filmmakers were tasked with writing the movie that went with it? Imagine what we would end up with based on this track alone.
Maybe Eruption Artistique is a revolutionary step in underground film creation. Perhaps they are the most alternative take on alternative rock out there. Maybe they are just a visionary and forward-thinking band (and music being cyclical means that if you look far enough forward, you are actually looking back, ironic, huh). Maybe they are all of those things. There is no maybe about it.
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