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Ra: Raoul loves you Confronted with the prospect of a 70-minute, 16-song debut by French illustrator-turned-musician Raoul Sinier (aka Ra), one imagines Sinier throwing his accumulated output at the wall and hoping at least some of it will stick, resulting in a stylistic smorgasbord of middling quality. As it turns out, Raoul loves you is, on the whole, better than that, even if it is excessively long. Ra's grimy material oozes a woozy, at times druggy ambiance as it makes caustic and fractured nods to hip-hop, jungle, breakcore, and jazz. “Intro (Raoul Loves You),” an ugly overture of gritty noise and fractured beats, doesn't bode well but things pick up immediately thereafter. In “Ev.panic,” chopped voices babble over an ominous, clanking funk base interspersed with romping jazz-inflected moments while “Human Saw Tool” offers a curdling dirge of grimy sludge injected by animated breakbeats. Two standouts suggest a Prefuse influence: in the scuzzy head-nodder “You'll Be @#!,” beat splatter grinds out a quasi-jazzy vibe, and “Fudge Brownie Brain” presents a hazy stutter-funk groove of scratching, buried melodies, and deep strings. The album detours into skuzzy breakcore on “Violent Badger” with what sounds like John McLaughlin's violent guitar wails in the background. It's a credible enough outing, then, though Raoul loves you would impress more at a leaner 50 minutes. Given the amount of music on offer, no one would greatly miss the stumbling hip-hop of “Fee,” for example, nor the incoherent voice slicing on “The Dentist.” The recording ends with the episodic and off-kilter “High Point” (featuring vocals by Sylvie Frétet) and a superfluous reprise of the caustic “Human Saw Tool,” both of which also could have been excluded at no great loss.September 2005 |
