While this involuntary action can illicit melancholy there is nothing one can do. You get older, along with everything else...My ears have been soothed but the River Styx operetta that is La Mort D'Orion. In my previous post I gushed praise in Pearls Before Swine's Balaklava. That record record filled my younger years with hope that there was something else out there then the general music for knuckle heads and suburban idiots. How much of the 90's was spent in combat mode - G n' R at the ready? Now granted most of the items in this blog would never get played on a juke box (small aside; one time I found my self in a Queens biker bar located on Union Turnpike and put on Tomorrow Never Knows.I watched to my joy and amazement as the burly bar tender did a 60's shimmy go go dance to the pounding of Ringo Stars drumming). So where would this type of music get played? In darkened basements, downer parties, solo explorations of the cosmos and it's accompanying neither-worlds. How I wish I had known of Gerard Manset's recordings, what a perfect weapon it would have been back then against the hordes.
Not unlike the above mentioned Pearls Before Swine, the second record is the stunner. His first already had a quality that was odd for a projected pop star - snotty dismissive vocals not unlike Lou Reed in the 70's, sound effects, song forms that owe more to classical with no discernible middle eight. When coupled with coming out during the May 1968 riots, his debut sold next to nothing.
While history is littered with bands and performers that one wonders what it...and regardless of his idiosyncratic style and bad timing, he was given a second chance. How lucky he and we both are. Who knew that one man could translate out the map of decedent moroseness worthy of Hysman at his finest. This is the soundtrack to La Bas. Weariness permeates the musical proceedings, but at no point has Manset lost his virility. The orchestrations also by Manset are never fruity, but bold accents that bring this into a new territory that John Cale would explore in the
Falklands Suite nearly twenty years later. I have mentioned the two of three monoliths of The Velvet Underground, and it is in way to say that Manset is lesser in their shadow. He is every part their contemporary, if not the secret genetic melding of Msr's Reed and Cale. It can happen you know, there was a genetic laboratory in Florida that was working on a ape human hybrid. Not for any practical purposes mind you, but the grant money had to be spent by fiscal years end.Apparently the La Mort D'Orion was a hit in France, and praise must be given to Mansets moves after its wake. There were a minimum of interviews, no concerts, no plans for an English translation, even the followup singles' picture sleeve used the same black cover motif but it was a reworking of one the parent albums songs. Yet Manset became a star in France, selling records and becoming of an institution of solitude. Further testimony to his fame, the cartoonist Bilal did a whole work based on the album.
Regretfully Gerard Manset would never sail again the same psychotropic ocean. While every album has that same man alone feel, and he augments with his own orchestrations, gone were the tape collage segments and use of other voices. The records following La Mort D'Orion are still apocalyptic, but just slightly less so.
The original LP was published on EMI, but I am yet to see an original copy. It is very doubtful that it was ever released in America. There was a CD reissue sometime in the late 90's or early 00's, but this has gone out of print. What is available now is a gray area release by a suspect Korean label WPS. The sound quality is clear and must have come from the reissue. Thanks must be given to the person who did the mastering, for the sound is of high quality.
Please click on review title for La Mort D'Orion: La Mort D'Orion
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