[engl] 200 copies. Hand screen printed sleeve.

[engl] Still unknown in rock territory, French band Cannibale gets its name from its «kind of exotic garage» music whose humid tropical groove is slowly eating up all the stereotypes about Born Bad releases. If there’s cannibalism to be found in «No Mercy for Love», it’s in reference to the Caribbean rhythms here and there, and to the psychedelic sound from the backwoods that make this first album a peculiar occurrence in the land of strikes and wine drinkers. There’s never any silence with Cannibale and, as for the lambs, we’ll stick to the village in the middle of nowhere where the band members reside—a hamlet in Normandy with a total population of 300 including the cows. Rather than human flesh, these guys have been feeding on their own impatience. Their tale, just like their music, doesn’t fit any usual standards: lead guitarist Manuel and singer Nicolas met in junior high (which is the case for 99% of rock bands so far), but the members of Cannibale have a Frustration type profile—almost all of them are over forty. What happened during the last twenty years? With unbending faith, these guys played in loads of bands that never made it to the top (Amib, De Rien, 7Questions, Kouyaté Neerman, Renza Bo, Blast…) and even ended up playing as session musicians alongside Camile Bazbaz or Johnny Halliday. After winning the Inrocks Labs contest with Bow Low, their penultimate band, and releasing two albums with Because Editions, the Norman guys finally decided to create Cannibale in 2016. In theory, considering the beginning of their career, or lack thereof, you couldn’t imagine you’d end up hearing the sounds from «No Mercy for Love»: a surprising mixture of cumbia, African rhythms and garage music. Or, if you will, a kind of missing link between Fela Kuti, The Doors, and The Seeds. So as to climb the ladder of success, Cannibale eventually had the good idea to add a seat to the table and contact JB from Born Bad. That’s when the story turns into a remake of The Wild One, the Brando movie: «JB told us he liked what he heard, so he drove his motorcycle to our place, tried to impress us with a controlled skid, and then we had mashed potatoes. He helped himself to two more servings and said ‘’This mash is totally fuucked!’’ Later on, on his way out, he said: ‘’Let’s hit the road to glory!’’ So now we wait.» With such tracks as Hidden Wealth, Carribean Dream, or Mama, stay patient guys, success shouldn’t be too late to come now. Following other recent releases such as El Blaszyck’s «The Quirky Lost Tapes» and «Rhapsode» by Forever Pavot—whom Cannibale resembles at times—this album is yet another testimony of the label’s open-mindedness, a proof of the boss’s passion for uncommon destinies. Who else would have betted on a bunch of forty year-olds whose origins are as white as their soul is black? No one, in theory. «Releasing the album in our forties, we think it’s a laugh. Of course we keep on believing, it’s all we do, it’s what’s keeping us alive.» Goes to show you can be called Cannibale and still believe in resurrections.

[engl] If Cannibale’s members brought their breakfast back up when talking about “Not easy to cook”, their listeners would be surprised. These fortysomethings being signed by Born Bad Records, the image of greaser-looking garage rockers would come to mind, but with bits of exotica stuck between the teeth, Nino Nardini & Roger Roger’s “Jungle Obsession” spilled on the table, and plastic-bottled tropical glam puked by some even more stupid incarnation than Wayne’s World’‘s Mike Myers. The stage is set, now you have to clean up everything. Why mention all this? Because there’s a world of difference between the beginning of Cannibale’s success story and this second album. It wouldn’t take much to feel as if Freddie Mercury showed up in a Renault 16 supersport to play marimba for old oafish rock fans. And actually, that’s about it: The Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Fela Kuti in rain boots. And though the amount of cows hasn’t increased in the Normandy hole these guys hail from, the number of their shows did. Between “No Mercy For Love” (their 2017 debut album), and the new one “Not easy to cook”, these Frogs – to quote the title of the opening track – did not switch from psyche cumbia to coarse-grained autotune, but rather roamed roads like doped cyclists: more than 100 dates in less than a year (including quite a few with Frustration and the Villejuif Underground), festivals such as Rock en Seine, and a eulogistic press review: “Indolent rhythms invoking Latin America and Africa.” (Mowno) “Nomadic, willingly sunny garage rock.” (Libération) “Songs that provoke visions or hallucinations.” (France Inter) See, Johnny Hallyday himself did not get such media coverage! So what’s Cannibale’s secret? Being old and giving 19-year-old kids who just discovered marimba tutorials on YouTube a thrashing? Certainly, but it’s a little more than a band of old fogeys. “The band learned it all on the road in less than two years,” says Born Bad’s Jean-Baptiste Guillot. Songwriting-wise, they’ve known how to do for a long time. The members – survivors of various screwed-up musical projects – finally succeeded because nothing else than music mattered anymore. In that, the band’s deviant trajectory is not so different from Vox Low’s, another in-house signing. But the most surprising thing about “Not easy to cook” is the sultriness that emerges. It’s hard to sum it up other than by comparing these 10 songs with some pressure cooker in which bits of dancehall, London ska and Hawaiian dub would have cooked together. Here’s the small miracle achieved by this LP recorded by the band in its remote French village: sounding French, but Polynesian French. With “Not easy to cook”, frogs, birds, sounds from the jungle can be heard in a living room. Those already traumatized by Arthur Lyman’s vibraphone and Les Baxter‘s Lounge music should feel at home; novices will finally discover something other than Saturdays at the Whole Foods Market store.