CD: Scratch Massive - Nuit de Rêve

Scratch Massive sound from their name as if they should be a very dodgy hip-hop outfit. They are not. Instead, French duo Maud Geffray and Sebastien Chenaut are a music-based art unit who have worked on sonic projects with Karl Lagerfeld, soundtracked films for Zoe Cassavettes and were once produced by German techno DJ-producer Moritz von Oswald. Their first album, back in 2003, dabbled in hefty rock dynamics but somewhere along the way – possibly that Moritz von Oswald connection - they were persuaded of the power of synthesisers.

Their third album is a moody beast that wishes it were Eighties electropop but is too dark and grandly widescreen to neatly fit that niche. True, it sounds thoroughly retro and suitably glacial in places, but Scratch Massive cannot quite stick to a stark android blueprint. Instead, they sound like all those Seventies synth sorts - Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, John Carpenter, and so on - but filtered through the gloomy musical prism of early Gary Numan and industrial electronic bands such as Front 242. The opening “Pleine lune” sets the scene, coming on like baddy music from the TV series Miami Vice, but on Mogadon, or “Break Away” which assimilates the keyboard riff from “Jump” by Van Halen into something a European Goth club might play at the end of the night.

There are guest singers such as Jimmy Somerville and Daniel August of Gus Gus but they don’t really make much of an impact. Nuit de rêve (Dream Night) isn’t really about songs, as such, it’s about throwing theatrical instrumental shapes, large-scale po-faced atmospherics with a wink of knowingness. Even “Nuit de mes rêves”, with its growled Gallic vocals and smidgeon of I’m Your Man-era Leonard Cohen, is actually another excuse for machines to conjur with dark opulence. It’s posing music for moody, black-clad drama queens and, as such, works rather well.

Watch the video for "Paris"