The Death Set - Michel Poiccard

As far as statements go, they don’t get too much bolder than: “I wanna take this tape and blow up your fucking stereo”. And that’s just what The Death Set venture to do with second LP ‘Michel Poiccard’ through a series of 17, on the whole, uncompromisingly high-energy, pile driving tracks. The kind of thing you either love or loathe, depending on the mood.

Blighted by the sad loss of co-founder Beau Velasco, rather than navel gazing and philosophising their existence, the remaining band have created a suitably referential take on tribute. Naming the album after French cinema’s A Bout De Souffle’s lead character – a roguish and New Wave figure – as well as featuring a track ‘Michel Poiccard Prefers The Old’, there’s also the longest album track ‘I Miss You Beau Velasco’. The influence of the film could be said to lie in the album’s brief and disorientating nature, matching the film’s favoured jump cuts (that act to spastically chop the frames), as well as Michel Pioccard’s epic death scene.

Music wise, it’s distinctly the work of The Death Set, albeit with a little help in places from friends in the forms of SpankRock and Diplo. The latter’s helter skelter melodic influence on ‘Yo David Chase! You P.O.V. Shot Me In The Head’ is there but otherwise there is little to distinguish this conspirator from the group’s whole. Comparatively the ‘7AM Woke Up An Hour Ago’ is slower to build and given a more beach rock guitar, more akin to The Soft Pack.

‘I’ve Been Searching For This Song Called Fashion’ is an all-out guitar assault and, as with most of the band’s repertoire, is sufficiently short and giddily repetitive. Equally brutal, but with more vocal haranguing ‘Too Much Fun For Regrets’, smashes into your cerebellum as not an entirely unpleasant experience, but a thankfully brief one. On that note, the scratchy break that is ‘Kittins Inspired by Kittens’ makes for a nice divergence.

Bratty and uncompromising, you get the feeling in small doses you could almost control The Death Set. But at their most lethal en masse of guitars, drums, and shouting, on the basis of ‘Michel Pioccard’, you’d get a leash on them and still be run amok.