It gets harder to check out new music in 2007 without being confronted by the 1980s. From the ironic disco of Calvin Harris to the Chameleons-referencing dram-rock of Editors and Gwen Stefani's shameless aping of 'True Blue'-era Madonna, The Decade Decency Forgot has been rehabilitated as an era when the pop music, at least, was big, bright and knowingly subversive. Which is easier to believe when you weren't there, trying to avoid Howard Jones and Huey Lewis and the News. But time always filters art, and leaves young musicians with only the good stuff to steal. Hence Black Strobe, a French quartet who have spent the past decade making the kind of punk-influenced disco that has finally hit the mainstream, and have now made a stylish, punchy, dance-rock debut album, full of the are-they-kidding? camp machismo that harks back to Eighties leather 'n' patchouli acts such as Sisters of Mercy, and smack-and-S&M-era Depeche Mode.
Burn Your Own Church is inspired, in the titular sense, by the bizarre world of Norwegian black metal, and its Nineties history of men called Count Von Grizzzlar or somesuch burning down churches and killing each other (see OMM18). Hence stunning instrumental opener 'Brenn Di Ega Kjerke' ('Burn Your Own Church' in Norwegian) and its blend of dark disco, metal guitars and essence of Nine Inch Nails/Front 242 'industrial' body music, another Eighties-derived trend from which David 'Siskid' Shaw, Bastien Burger, Benjamin Beaulieu and vocalist Arnaud Rebotini - what fabulous names! - gleefully pilfer. The four also picked the perfect backroom boys to establish their fusion of dancefloor light and alt-rock dark, with production from indie-dance remixer du jour Paul Epworth and a mix by Alan Moulder, the veteran moulder of every masochistic drug-fuelled misery 'n' shagging art-rocker from the Jesus and Mary Chain and Depeche Mode to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson.
It all comes together best on the fast ones, where Rebotini's deep, camp and dramatically ill Franglais voice growls and croons apocalyptic sex lyrics over immaculately funky melds of rock and house, reaching a peak of humour and heat on an electro-glam cover of Bo Diddley's classic blues brag, 'I'm a Man'.
Best of all, Black Strobe remain so deadpan throughout that you just can't tell whether their vision of the 'Last Club on Earth' - which 'never shuts' until you've been 'to hell and back' with your object of desire - is the satirical joke of clever men or the ludicrous pretension of complete boneheads. Just as rock'n'roll ought to be.
Download: 'I'm a Man'; 'Shining Bright Star'; 'Brenn Di Ega Kjerke'
