Art rock has a long and proud lineage of straddling the commercial and avant-garde. In recent years, the term has been appropriated to describe namby-pamby indie bands formed not by artists, per se, but art students.
The distinction is crucial. Music that should by its nature strive to be exotic and mystifying has become stuck in the realm of the lumpen and pedestrian, fuelled by nothing more lofty than freshers' week japes.
Les Georges Leningrad, on the other hand, are art rock as it ought be. A girl-boy-boy combo from Montreal who come off like three modern primitives and exist within their own singular world, they ooze creativity. Singer Poney P , keyboardist Mingo L'Indien and drummer Bobo Boutin all wear self-made stage gear that resembles roughly- hewn superhero costumes and sport drawn-on tattoos, fashioned in the style you'd expect to find on some salty old mariner.
They look as if they have been clipped out of illustrations by punk artist Gary Panter (whose work graces sleeves for art rockers Frank Zappa and the Residents). You can imagine that when Les Georges sweat on stage it flies out in heart-shaped paper tears outlined by magic marker.
Their world is drawn from the bastard culture of Quebec, a combustible mix of French Creole, American pop culture and Inuit myths that they call 'petrochemical rock'. Sangue Puro, their third album, is a witches' brew of spook house soundscapes, propulsive no-wave rhythms and squelching disco that jitters into life around some vague concept involving bats and blood and shamanic chanting.
When Poney sings, she does so in a voice that skips from haunted to hysteri cal to the sound of a hip, urban vamp. Meanwhile the boys seem stuck in some devolved rhythmic state, banging out 'mammal beats' and uttering mangled approximations of language. A case in point is 'Sleek Answer' on which Poney raps a jumbled stream of ad slogans, self-help maxims and tabloid headlines, punctuated by Bobo's breathless grunts.
'Mange Avec Tes Doigts' (Eat With Your Fingers ) is an urgent call to regress, to feel the muck of the world pass through your hands as it travels inexorably all the way up to your maw. As you consume, consume, consume, you feel yourself breaking down to a primal ooze. And that's the sound of Les Georges Leningrad.
Recommended: 'Sleek Answer'; 'Mange Avec Tes Doigts'
