Puts Marie - Masoch I-II

Could it be the music I was expecting deep down inside, without knowing it, since maybe 10 years?

Test it yourself... So what? Do you have a dry throat? A feeling of apnoea sometimes? Perfectly normal! And try to listen when you’re lacking sleep: I guarantee you will raise off the ground!

It’s difficult for me not to love everything in this album. From the outset, the lunar "A Quantum of Sun" puts things in the right place. We’re already high, but then each track is working on getting us even higher. And the level is dead stratospheric with "Brush Air". Some faint-hearted amongst you will certainly have given up, knocked to the canvas since a long time. Never mind. Go back to your usual artists always the same ilk, may it be metal, commercial or rap, etc. Those won’t do you no harm. Won’t do you no good either. But leave us rock! Leave us this rock!
For, if Puts Marie members claim they are rather fans of hip-hop, classical music or jazz, it’s a rock sound indeed that comes from the blend of their influences as soon as they grab their instruments. A plaintive and harrowing rock, poignant, with intensity and contrast anywhere anytime.
Relying on regular aids of ternary rhythms ("Horse Gone Far", "All Yours am I", "A Quantum of Sun") and of minor keys almost exclusively. If you intended to laugh, just move along.

There is excessiveness and flights against a backdrop of piano arpeggios ("Obituaries") like in Muse early years – before those catch delusions of grandeur, football-stadium-sized.
Max Usata’s swishing (or Swiss-ing?) voice may not provide you with the most harmonious singing you’ve ever heard, and yet... it sticks so well to that music, able of the right modulations at the right places they’re needed. Here is his intelligence. You can hear in his timbre a bit of Ben Harper sometimes ("Lost Soul"). Or a guttural folk chorus that reminds you of the Pogues ("The Bathhouse").
It becomes rough in the nirvanesque "Sugar Run" and in the first third of "Mob Kisses" (the other 2 thirds being as mind-blowing as can be).

From the almost sober sleeve, with the exception of an iron (in the bass-player Igor Stepniewski’s hand), you may wonder what the pencil-drawn cabalistic signs below mean? I’ve found it. Place yourself in front of a mirror, and you can read ПУТС МАРИ, put another way... PUTS MARIE in Cyrillic alphabet!

This album titled 'masochist' (in short) therefore has an apposite name: while pressing where it hurts it does you so much good.
...Could it be the music you were expecting since 10 years?