Noir Désir
666.667 Club

THE REVIEW

Do you remember those from "Le vent nous portera"? Yes, them!!! The ones who were everywhere for an entire summer!!! If you've only listened to that song by Noir Désir and think they always made that kind of music, you're hugely mistaken: their roots are in Rock!!!

"666.667 club" is the fifth studio album by the group, released in 1996, coming after "Tostaky", the most "extreme" album of their entire discography. The CD opens with the title track, a sort of intro that acts as a limbo for the album. The second track "Fin de siècle" immediately shows the raw and naked face of rock that the group played: essential and distorted guitars prominently and Bertrand Cantat's voice shouting throughout the piece, almost as if to release all the anger in his body against the powerful.
"Un jour en France" is an anthem for young French people from almost ten years ago, a more catchy song but with a text that is anything but apolitical. "A ton étoile" is a piece with a slower rhythm of good quality. "Ernestine" is a piece that momentarily breaks with the explosive charge of the first tracks, where the musical part is entrusted to an electric guitar and a violin, later accompanied by a timid drum.
With "Comme elle vient" the charge returns in the form of late '70s punk, with a pogo rhythm that will not spare you during a concert, because it grabs you and doesn't let go until the end. Track number 7 "Prayer for a wanker" is the first sung in English by Cantat on this album, followed by "Les persiennes" in which a sax is heard for the first time, at the beginning and the end of the song itself.
"L'homme pressé" is another anthem written by the group in which the rhythms return to the ones of the second track, with Cantat screaming all his anger expressed also in the lyrics, a harsh critique against French politics, followed by "Lazy".
The last three tracks are acoustic: the first "A la longue": guitar accompanied by bass and in the background a drum with a harmonica at the end. "Septembre, en attendant", electric guitar and voice, and "Song For JPL", with which the group wants to experiment with blues, poorly executed due to Cantat's too overbearing voice.

With tremendously political lyrics, distorted guitars, and the voice of the leader who properly interprets the lyrics, the group from Bordeaux hits the heart of the French, a success replicated with "Des visages des figures" from 2001, only to have their career abruptly interrupted due to the death of the leader's wife, Marie Trintignant, killed by him in Vilnius one afternoon in the summer of 2003, with an eight-year sentence for a person who had a reputation in the '90s, completely lost with this brutal act. Truly a shame.