Mojo Magazine, CD Review >>
Lo'Jo
Au Cabaret Sauvage
Boundary-crossing musical gypsies come home with their best album to date.
"DON"T TRY to describe their sound," advises the sleevenote so here goes nothing. The opener comes on like a gloriously orchestrated Tindersticks, then sisters Nadia and Yamina Nid El Mourid join Denis Péan's vocals and it turns African. Among the rhythm instruments are a WWI bombshell, a polystyrene plank through which nails have been hammered and some marbles. OK, let's ignore the sound for a minute. Lo'Jo come from the Loire Valley in France. This is their fourth album proper, but they have building this elusive sound for 20 years, operating as a wandering tribe within the region's counterculture: best mates with poets, acrobats, sculpters and the like. So imagine a French circus with the spirit of the raggle-taggle Waterboys, directed by the team behind Delicatessen: now you've got an idea what they sound like. Not the Tindersticks. Previous recordings have seen them try to find African roots to their music, but now they seem more content to add flavours from that continent to an undeniably French brew, or, as those sleevenotes put it, travel with "a different colour dust on their shoes".
David Hutcheon 02/01/03
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