After several extensive DIY world tours with his partner in pipes Enora Morice (from Wuhan to Bal?more via Ullapool ?!!), jester in chief Jazz Lambaux recently seKled and channeled the material he recorded over the past few years into a manifest album for Édi?ons Gravats (some of which got released as singles via excellent Brussels-based label City Links and video clips directed by Jazz himself).
Almost 40 years a"er Baudrillard’s America, Jazz Lambaux offers his own fantasy of TV-fed - mostly white - third millennial suburban America. Music for Fools (2022-2024) is an elegy for a demographic with liKle-to-no property ownership prospects, entangled in a never ending culture war and a meaningless consump?on race - a meager solace for a genera?on raised on Green Day’s American Idiot and Marilyn Manson’s Portrait Of An American Family.
Contrary to what its ?tle suggests, Music For Fools (2022-2024) is not a mere compila?on of tracks and skits lazily extracted from Jazz Lambaux’s hard drive to jus?fy a touring habit. Like most of his fellow buffoons, the Mountain Dew-fueled Punchinello is smarter than he’s willing to pretend, and the narra?on his debut album offered is among the most uncompromising and cinematographic ones we’ve heard in the early 2020’s.
Punctuated by post-modern vignettes echoing Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Eminem’s own deranged comedy skits (special men?on to the goofily Ka]aian “Broken Jukebox in B-Flat Major”), the album progresses towards a rela?vely radiant conclusion, conjuring the dizzying junk of US teenagealia it emerged from, touched by the grace of MTV-friendly gods. Ecsta?c pop songs on steroids (“America”, “Yesterday”, “Paranoid”) - summoning the aforemen?oned acts - alternate with biKersweet ballads (“Twilight”, “Rockstar”), recalling the heydays of campus radios and Tori Amos’s mainstream avant-garde Boys For Pele. But all songs and instrumentals bath in that same hyperreal uncanniness, a grinning paranoid glow that blossomed in the mid-00’s through works likeGregg Araki’sKaboom,Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly or Korn’s Twisted Transistor video clip... A trip through America’s guilt, led by a French cousin of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
