LES POUMONS GONFLÉS

For their third studio recording and fourth album overall, EFL presented their most refined and diverse collection up to that time. With subtle production by Fred Frith, their breakneck collision of French chanson and the rhythmic implications of the Magic Band, here takes on the additional inspirations of Nino Rota, musique concrete experiments, and fellow RIO alumnus, Sweden's Zamla Mammaz Manna.

The title Les Poumons Gonfle (Lungs Filled with Air) is borrowed from Baudelaire's La Musique, which finds a potent musical setting here. In new recruit, Jo Thirion, the dynamic team of Ferdinand & Guigou find a foil worthy of their unique talents. Her compositions and stabbing percussive organ playing brings a new level of depth to the organic precision of high tuned, strummed bass guitar and oblique skittering drum melodies, rounded out by the lyrical saxophone of Bernard Mathieu.

To paraphrase what Carla Bley once wrote about EFL, in their development they moved from raucous, screeching free rock to layering exclamatory vocals over shifting repetitve figures, like a punk Fred Rzewski with Sun Ra on the organ. This worthy effort is the transitional recording, but any review would not be complete without a mention of Ferdinand Richard's Novel Roman like narratives full of word play and puns, humor and absurdity with an underlying melancholy. For me he is rock's answer to Raymond Queneau.