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Review: 'Sinier, Raoul'
'Late Statues'   

-  Album: 'Late Statues'
-  Genre: 'Pop' -  Release Date: '16th March 2015'

Our Rating:
‘‘Late Statues’ revives his most radical side’, the press release warns us, and sure enough, the album explodes with a wall of distortion and grating industrial noise: skewed synths slant across a rumbling bass and thumping beats. Sinier’s voice soars, lost and lonely through the dense sonic undergrowth, making the sprawling seven-minute ‘Stones and Rocks’ a song that evokes Radiohead and Oceansize, but is distinctly Sinier. It’s one hell of a way to start an album, sending the listener’s thought-waves in all directions, and it’s immediately apparent that ‘Late Statues’ is going to be heavier than either of the two albums which preceded it.

Shuffling beats underpin feedback drones and expansive synths: Sinier builds a bleak post-punk atmosphere on ‘Hello My World’ but not without losing accessibility or melody. The compositions on ‘Late Statues’ are carefully crafted and meticulously layered, the production dense. ‘Good Times’ is powerfully dark, the overloading sounds almost burying the nifty goth-tinged electro-pop tune that lies beneath.

‘She Has a Gun’ finds Sinier adrift in a surreal scene in a wash of bleak, glacial synths sliding over a gritty bass; listening to Sinier’s voice here, I’m reminded of Morten Harket, and if A-Ha had played electro-doom, it would have probably sounded like this. It leads into the majestic vortex of sound that is ‘New Horn’, which scales new heights of dark density and represents one of the album’s highlights. There are plenty of them, not least of all the expansive ‘Journey With the Vixen Queen’, which breaks out into a shimmering rock beast at around the six minute mark.

‘Late Statues’ possesses a rare immediacy thanks to Sinier’s keen sense of melody, and while it’s tempered by the screeds of noise layers that obfuscate the tunes and muddy the production, this is all for the better in that each play reveals new depths. It’s apparent that not only is there a great musical adeptness at play here, but also an immense musical vision being pieced together, and Sinier realises it magnificently. Without so much as a second that’s sub-par, ‘Late Statues’ is Sinier’s most eclectic, complex, meticulous, and accomplished work to date: unique, and utterly spellbinding.

Raoul Sinier Online
  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Sinier, Raoul - Late Statues