catalogue

FRUSTRATION

SO COLD STREAMS (BORN BAD)

FRUSTRATION - SO COLD STREAMS 136943
format:
1 LP
release:
25.10.2019
label:
BORN BAD
item ID:
136943
barcode:
3521381557749
2019 album of France's seminal Postpunk/New Wave/Independent outfit FRUSTRATION, including guest feature by Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods! At this stage of the FRUSTRATION's championship, the band could have been satisfied with releasing a record that was essentially identical to the previous one, intense, abrasive, honest but without risk, and could have continued to fill the rooms without anyone having to complain about it by slowly moving towards an exit as dignified as it was inevitable.

But from the first bars of "Insane", an insane electro-punk pounding that you'd think you'd just come out of a 1988 EBM EP, you realize that the scenario isn't going to go as planned.

Instead of setting up a comfortable routine, Frustration recorded his fifth album as if it were the first, like a band formed 6 months ago that would have nothing to lose and a serious desire to fight it.

If the post-punk cavalry is still present (martial drums, elastic bass, hit-and-run guitars), So Cold Streams surprises with its energy, the virulence of certain lyrics and the many risk-taking, "Brume", a nightmare with industrial sounds screamed in French, to the very pop "Lil' White Sister" which looks surprisingly at the Smiths and Echo & The Bunnymen, as well as the sinuous and melancholic "Slave Markets" on which the band invited Jason Williamson, the singer of Sleaford Mods - a band that played a lot in Frustration's new youth.

"So Cold Streams is, paradoxically perhaps, our most disillusioned, energetic and free record.

Because the fire is still burning, because the passion is still intact, because they are not trying to pass for what they are not."