frustration: empires of shame

Frustration, the caring big brothers of the French indie scene, are closely intertwined with Born Bad's rise to fame. Their pathway in itself is symbolic: hailing from the garage closed circuit from the '90s, they gave up the tattoos and brilliantine rock to try something different - at the crossroads of punk and cold wave, of Métal Urbain, Killing Joke and Joy Division. The five fellows, not particularly renowned for their technical skills, found themselves invested with a peculiar grace, becoming avant-gardist just as they were entering their forties, and showing the way to a whole generation of bands that suddenly became aware that it was possible. Empires Of Shames is the third album by Frustration. They crushed mountain chains on Relax, uncovered new continents and rainforests with Uncivilized, so it's only logical they now project to terraform Mars planet with this album that celebrates their return to a cold hostility that echoes the one of punks going by the name of a Polish capital city (Warsaw). "Dreams, Law, Rights And Duties", "Just Wanna Hide" and "Excess" are punches in the knees as signs of welcome from Fabrice, whose voice wanders from a Curtis-like spleen to a cockney spit. If "Arrows Of Love" sounds like the album's break, this mesmerizing Smiths-like ballad turns into a proletarian anthem, one of the peaks on the album. "Mother Earth In Rags" will undoubtedly be a hit, given its harangue as baroque and dramatic as a speech from Lenin; "Cause You Runaway" shows that the lads have also listened to James Murphy; and "No Place" is a synth-punk-noise gem that will generate one hell of a pogo at the end of their next concert. Frustration is now this fully grown-up lion that has no intention of ending up as a bedside rug. This is the only reason why we agree to give in to music, this intrusive thing that never asks for our advice. The rest is just a background noise of conceited babbling saturating the feed of our souls.