We almost lost hope it: Love Sex Machine's previous album came out in 2016, eight years ago. What have the band from Lille been up to all this time? We don't really know, but it must have been a lot of nasty stuff, stuff that really sucks, because we find them a little tense. Or maybe downright furious: TRVE promises a succession of cosmic stomping sessions combining visceral rage, cosmic heaviness... and stupid humour. We're talking about a band who've released tracks like Silent Duck and Killed with a Monster Cock in the past, here. Yeah, well, ducks are not silent at all. And besides, ducks are not even ducks. Or cocks. Or any kind of stupid birds.
But as soon as FUCKING SNAKE (YES, WE'RE GOING TO WRITE THE TITLES IN CAPS BECAUSE THEY'RE MEANT TO BE YELLED), Love Sex Machine kill all the laughs. The sound is monumental, grandiloquent. The band have heard Amenra, of course, but also LLNN for that sense of crushing, that hallucinatory spatial touch brought by layers of synths that make us feel so small, so ridiculous, so infinitesimal... They impose an urgency and an unbearable tension on the whole album that is quite impressive.
In eight years, Love Sex Machine has become more incisive. The tracks are concise, biting, closer to black metal than doom (AUTISME FACTOR, not far from Wiegedood's most alienating tracks, or CANOPY and the hatred it oozes, for example) while retaining that unforgiving sense of big slapping and pachydermic groove (BODY PROBE). Of course, we're promised ironic lyrics, but since we don't really understand what the man's saying, it doesn't matter. We're scared. We're shaking of terror before that angry man. TRVE is a nightmare dripping with angst and hypnotic, almost mystical riffs, from which only an opaque darkness seems to emerge. Yet there are times when you breathe in before diving back in: the apotheosis of the last part of CANOPY, the melancholy melody that emerges underwater in BROKEN CODE, or the feeling of sacred contemplation imposed by the finale of HOLLYWOOD STORY, for example, give TRVE some strikingly beautiful parts, like admiring an ageless monolith emerging from the unfathomable coldness of nothing before annihilating you.
As you listen to the album, you're petrified by its menace, its sense of oppression, of misery, of danger. Love Sex Machine makes us feel pathetic. Oh, yes, we're nothing. Our will has been reduced to mush, yum, good pate for the masters, magnanimous masters, shrivel us up, devour us, annihilate us, thank you masters. We are nothing. How nice it is, nothingness.
