
BLACK DEVIL DISCO CLUB
Etincelles (Lo)
When Bernard Fevre and his Black Devil Disco Club project emerged in the early 2000s, it felt like a hoax. A 1970s library music musician from Paris who made electronic disco music that sounded so cutting-edge? Then ignored for 25 years until someone involved with Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label stumbled across it at a boot sale? Surely, this was another one of Richard D James’ pranks?
Well, here we are, eight albums later, and Fevre is still churning out the retro-futuristic disco with new release, Etincelles. And the opener Corps Magnifique sounds like it could’ve come straight from that breakout EP, with its pulsating synths and identikit drum sound. That’s until the crooning vocals come in, and that’s the sticking point with Etincelles. While it kinda works on the MOR-tinged title track, it doesn’t on the naff Où Est Le Vie?. Still, that cut is the only real duffer on Etincelles, a tidy mini-album of ambitious, eccentric disco from the once-lost electro pioneer that is Black Devil Disco Club.
words SAM EASTERBROOK