This is the 50th Anniversary re-issue of It's Always Rock & Roll the third album by French synth rock legends Heldon. The album was inspired by spending a couple of days with Philip K Dick In Los Angeles just before they went and recorded the album. The band were as ever led by Richard Pinhas along with Alain Renaud, Aurore and Alain Francois the album was produced by Joe Chip.
The A-side opens with Ics Machinique that has dark disrupting synth pulses and stabs that are opened out by some far brighter sounding keyboards.
Cotes De Cachalot A La Psylocybine is set to the correct wave patterns to interact with the shrooms you've taken, it will send you on a spectral journey into the hallucinating, mind melt far out universe Heldon are trying to create with fractal guitar splinters.
Mechammment Rock is more guitar driven, riffing along with the weird swooshes of the synths and loops subsonic maulings. Cocaine Blues is nothing like the Johnny Cash classic, this is dark dystopian lines copped haphazardly by a shroom frazzled sonic adventurer, to snort injecting a haze of snow into those florid hallucinations, that line opens your mind, you see the fractal spaces open out to new realities where this space age music really does take over the world.
The only song on the B-side is Aurore all 18 minutes of this mesmerizing journey, slowly emerging oscillating from your speakers, whooshing overhead, leading us into a fairytale world of gastronomic Gnosticism, glimpsing gauleiters global gourmandry. Borealis visions abound breaking waves of lights peaking through the clouds, dripping with mallards nodding mesmerically.
Side C opens with Virgin Swedish Blues as they try to re-work some Peps Persson Blues Quality into a Bo Hansson style fairytale of a Kraftskiva, fronting for some initiations and deflowering of a beautiful virgin Swede, whose slowly undressed and served before us, in an ancient rite and ritual to be complete within this tunes seven and a half minutes, before everyone downs several glasses of Schnapps and aquavit and scream Skaal together at the end of the tune.
Ocean Boogi takes us deep beneath the briny waves in search of Jacques treasures of the deep, wave after wave of guitar sophistry rush over the reef. Zind Destruction (Bouillie Blues) is like Houndog Taylor has taken a boat load of acid and is left freaking out on his guitar, trying to find his customary tone, its lost in the screeching wailing miasma they are creating, it descends into some sort of post-apocalyptic distended blues.
The album ends with Doctor Bloodmoney the only tune on side D, it takes 16 minutes to figure out all the ways the bad Doc has fleeced them over the years, setting the synths to repeat like a stuck record looping into your brain, mutating while picking your pockets, while your too busy hallucinating on the acid he gave you, before signing your life away in that deal, that finally allows the drums to become prominent for the first time on the album even if they sound like they are playing a different tune to the synths and guitars beneath them.
Find out more at https://shop.tapeterecords.com/heldon-it-s-always-rock-n-roll-heldon-iii-50th-anniversary-edition-4362 https://www.facebook.com/RichardPinhasHeldon https://heldon.bandcamp.com/album/its-always-rocknroll-heldon-iii
