J.C. Satan — Centaur Desire

LP version. Printed undersleeve. You can count on the fingers of one hand the bands you've loved up until their fifth album like J.C. Satàn - almost ten years after falling in love. There are dudes who have "seen them too much", heard them too much, and stopped expecting anything from them anymore. The Satàn crew did not deliver a fifth album just for the hell of it, just to justify their next tour: they got together to seek the rare fuel, the miraculous current able to galvanize our sleeping senses, the electroshock forcing us to revive the urgent impression of being alive. Centaur Desire has something of a new first-time record - recorded all together (Arthur and Dorian used to handle all instruments themselves), enhanced by an incredibly powerful sonority (gear has piled up over the last years), and filled with a new groove (Romain finally plays his drum parts, and it's fantastic). Never where you'd expect it, Paula's voice adds to the pervading climate of freshness. A formula had to be found, that combines an undeniable talent for composition with devastating live fury. Here it is, and some of this on-stage gold stabilized to get cut on record and reproduced endlessly until reaching our speakers. If the modern-era Nicholas Flamel extracting this yellow metal out of peat was called Josh Homme or Black Rebel Something, the whole world would be murmuring the ecstasy of court's flatterers. At a time when the aforementioned bigwigs are composing a supposedly magnum umpteenth opus that smacks a lot of schlock, J.C. Satàn release something that dashes all of them with the cheerfulness of freaks and the Rabelaisian, farcical mirth of a horny centaur inviting us to Pan's great farandole, in the setting of a Manowar sleeve. "Centaur Desire!" declaims a sonorous voice on the title song, just like one would invoke some demon/leviathan to lay low an army of muddy killer whales by hitting them with burning dildos. Like a superlative life, an explosion of springtime sap accompanying the great universal libidinous rush that seizes us in the cosmic shag or in the mosh pit. No doubt the fact that this fifth album is their best one to date is quite uncommon and leads one to wonder.