CENTENAIRE

The amazing city of Paris offers again a uniqe band, a company of young musicians who formed Centenaire in January 2006.These were all multi-instrumentalists, Damien Mingus, Aurélien Potier, Axel Monneau (aka Orval Carlos Sibelius) and Stéphane Laporte.The debut of the group was recorded for the short-lived independent label Chief Inspector and it was released in 2008.

Being fans of Folk music as well as more contemporary stylings, the Centenaire quartet tried to blend two different worlds in a unique and personal amalgam of delicate, trippy musicianship, where light electric textures meet with the acoustic, almost Medieval side of music.The result is elegant, artistic and charming, despite the obvious lack of dynamics.The huge instrumental armour the band uses, including cellos, metallophone, clarinet, melodica and organ, helps the overall style sounding rich and harmonic.The overall atmosphere has a light Post Rock vibe, however some slight GENESIS and GENTLE GIANT inspirations are also detectable, especially in the moments where organ and acoustic guitars dominate the music along with the usually polyphonic vocal arrangements.The music is far from complex, but the intensity and alternation between the instruments offer very dense and elaborate textures with some good melodies and dreamy, rural soundscapes as a result.The electric passages are somewhere between the softer KING CRIMSON vibes and the modern Post Rock scene of ambiental and atmospheric moves, though the compositions constantly change between this kind of stuff and warm, folk-tinged journeys of another age.

The idea of the group was definitely succesful, even more the music is easy-listening and very sensitive, sometimes with a Soundtrack vibe of a retro movie.Warmly recommended to fans of atmospheric and mellow music adventures.