Atoll – Cazotte No. 1
Atoll – Le Photographe Exorciste
Well, well, well…this tail end of 2016 didn’t exactly turn out the way I might have liked. I’ve been in a funk pretty much all of November and December that I’ve only recently gotten out of, and thus, there hasn’t been a lot of activity from me of late. But, a new year always brings with it optimism and the possibilities of change and rebirth. So, I’m ready to close out 2016 strongly and carry through into the next year sharing more music than ever before.
As is tradition, I always share the last record that I buy in a year, just before doing some type of mix featuring the best things I dug up over the past 12 months. In 2016’s case, that last record was by French progressive rock group Atoll, swiped from Amoeba for a fraction of what it used to go for on the open market. A major part of the album’s appeal was the fantastic artwork by Yves Uro, who gained a measure of fame designing posters for Ibiza’s first disco club KU. The image at the center of the front cover is what you see here, one of several that I bought this year with a birth/egg motif. Musically, Atoll, connects to many other groups in that “Prog” scene, a solid, if not spectacular, sound, with the added pleasure of all of the lyrics, as they are on “Le Photographe Exorciste,” being sung in French (my preference is for non-English bands to not sing in English). “Cazotte #1” is the only proper instrumental on the album and gives a sense of the band’s strengths, along with a nice, clean, open drum break towards the end. There were periods of time where I felt like I had lost my record mojo, but just over the past month-ish, I felt it was back. Looking forward to sharing much much more in 2017.