Picore
Assyrian Vertigo

If a person takes out the eye of another,
let their eye be taken out.
(The Code of Hammurabi)

If the English music critic Simon Reynolds had the intuition to coin in 1994 a term that has now become essential like “POST-ROCK”, who am I to launch into the world of music, in capital letters, the term “ANTE-ROCK”? But who are you to propose yet another musical subgenre, my kind (?!?) readers will immediately say. No one, even if I am one of the few (on the tube, the video of “Meurs Menace” published on October 19, 2012, today has a whopping 107 views) who has listened to and appreciated “Assyrian Vertigo”, a very strange 2011 album by the French Picore, in their third release after “Discopunkture” (2003) and “L'Hélium Du Peuple” from 2006.

The album starts and, suddenly, we are hurled with extreme violence back in time (thousands of years ago) to the highest point of a ziggurat, a characteristic temple construction of the Mesopotamian regions (do you remember the Tigris and the Euphrates?) destined for worship for the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian religions. We become the priests of a mysterious and occult rite, ready to heat and excite the crowd to submit it to the divine will, ready to sacrifice life and blood to an irate and vengeful celestial deity. The “industrial” salvos of Picore blend with a violent and obsessive tribalism of percussion that dazes until reaching ecstasy. The will of self-annihilation and the search for mystical elevation chase each other in the 13 tracks amid instrumental blows, dark cinematic frescoes, restful interludes, noise moments, and metallic slashes, between epic and anguishing atmospheres. The pieces draw a piece of distant history, the kind we studied carefully and with interest in elementary school: the fertile crescent, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, cuneiform writing, King Nebuchadnezzar, Gilgamesh (which was also a two-act opera by Battiato in '92), the Code of Hammurabi.

A violent and bloody album like all of our History, suspended between the industrial ugliness of the “ever-praised” Einstürzende Neubauten and the electric riffs worthy of the best post-rock around. An album out of the box, open to chaos and the most insidious noise. An album for ears well-trained to noise and pain, for those who love subjecting their soul to the sacred ceremony of musical purification to drive away the spiritual and material miasmas that modern life throws at us.

Music out of this world, a vertigo that will take us back before time, before rock, ANTE-ROCK.