Criminal

Albumbeschreibung

Colder than a butcher’s floor, Criminal exudes dark and fleshy sensuality. Between liquid post-punk and metallic loops, Luis Vasquez violently launches into ten aggressive tracks. It’s beautiful and scary, dark and penetrating. Cathartic, this fourth album can be considered as an open heart surgery. After the noisy dark wave of The Soft Moon and Zeros, whose industrial minimalism was going further and further in the search of visual abstraction, Deeper gave a first glimpse of the Californian’s tortured mind. Returning to an obvious prison intensity in the style of Nine Inch Nails (Burn and Born Into This), Criminal dilutes the nuances, shakes gothic guitars, effects units and ambient units to better free a voice suffocated by the layers of mixing, exorcise the anguish and meet Depeche Mode and Soft Kill with distant pop residue reminding of Prince’s Cream (Choke). After the vaporous dissections of It Kills and The Päin, which expand this claustrophobic universe to a more supple esthetic, close to KVB, Criminal finishes in a blaze of glory. As evidenced by the cover, by verbalizing, Vasquez lightens his esthetic and transition to figuration. It was high time. © CS/Qobuz