Malade de Souci - MMMM-bbaa
(No Sides)
The "enigmatic" duo that make up Malade de Souci offer no clues as to their identities, who plays what instrument, or where, when, or how MMMM-bbaa was recorded. In fact, all that can really be discerned after listening to the album is that the band is made up of hyperactive drums and trebly, spaghetti-strung guitar, and that Malada de Souci have little patience and probably very short attention spans. The disc's twenty-five tracks, which fly by like a sped up Ruins' album in only about eighteen minutes, are short bursts of punchy guitar and busy drums (with occasional vocals, yelped unintelligibly) that bump into and off of each other in jumbled, angular fashion. Directions change quickly, as do tempos and rhythms, and it's often hard to tell whether a song has simply taken a new turn or a new piece altogether has begun. Malade de Souci, in a short span of time, manage to come off as both a clattering noise band and some sort of twee math rock/prog nouveau outfit, but with most of MMMM-bbaa's track times hovering near the thirty-second mark, there's little time to put much thought into classifying this band into a more well-worn pigeon hole. Due to varying recording quality and volume, it's easy to surmise that MMMM-bbaa is a collage of many different recording sessions, though all of the work on the album shares a similar aesthetic, so aural archaeologists would most likely guess that it was all recorded during the same musical era in the band's existence. Though Malade de Souci, throughout all of their frantic twists and turns, never really go in a completely unexpected direction or seem to stretch themselves beyond a modus operandi that's established early on in MMMM-bbaa, the album whips by so quickly that, after the whiplash subsides, it's not a major problem.
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