Zita Swoon
I Paint Pictures On A Wedding Dress

THE REVIEW

Brazenly creative, brilliant, eclectic (he dabbles in painting, theater, contemporary art), Stef Kamil Carlens, former bassist of dEUS, has always been the leader of this hard-to-classify quintet, which moves with singular personality among various genres such as rock, funk, experimental blues à la Tom Waits, disco, ska, and pure noise.
The Zita Swoon also have a bit of an obsession with long and quirky titles. The first experiment (it was '93 and they were A Beatband) is called Jintro Travels The World In A Skirt; in 1995 (under the name Moondog Jr), they released Every Day I Wear A Greasy Black Feather On My Hat; the following year (now permanently Zita Swoon), they composed Music Inspired By Sunrise, A Film By F.W. Murnau.

The masterpiece—both as a title and as an album—is this one from 1998 and sees SKC and companions engaged in "painting images on a wedding dress." Among the 12 painted images, none are faded, all have vivid and changing colors, and many are truly splendid (above all, the very simple Ragdoll Blues). Much of the credit goes to the voice of the androgynous Stef, a brush that changes thickness depending on the light to be given to the image: tenderly desperate when addressing Jeff Buckley (Song For A Dead Singer), cartoonish in the entertaining funky tale One Perfect Day, serious and deformed in the lazy 50 Years In Dope Jittery. But all the workshop's painters are up to par: especially Tomas De Smet, whose double bass is as precise and quirky as it is on stage, and Bjorn Ericsson, an electric guitar that's varied, never intrusive, yet decisive.

In BelgioNetherlands these five guys have a certain (deserved) credit; elsewhere, however, they are known—if at all—only as an offshoot of dEUS, and are almost unfindable. But for them, it's absolutely worth clicking the "confirm order" button.