La Folie – Risus Sardonicus

I got a very interesting album today, though the cover seemed a little bit as if all of my childhood traumas were reflected on that image: circus, an elephant, acrobats… anyway, I was pretty excited to listen to this new acquisition called Risus Sardonicus, by La Folie (I dig the name!)

There’s something about the circus that has always left me at unease; it’s maybe pretending, it’s maybe a parallel reality or just making fun at reality itself. Circus is the main concept of this album, and the result is quite interesting and calls for the uncanny.

Risus Sardonicus (11 tracks total) is all bundled with a touch of mystery, unease, experimental guitars, keyboard, angry voices, a circus-context full of sarcasm and distorted reality fulfilling what I see in these kind of shows: just a raw, straight-forward and bitter critic to how people conduct their lives, erratic behaviours, as losing one’s welfare, like a mind cannot be sound no longer.

At its very beginning, ‘Interlopers’ (first track) invites listeners to escape reality; a ticket to chaos to the parallel universe, where these brilliant musicians have built only with their perspective of music composition. It shows a great guitar-distorted unveiling our “malaise”, and keyboards for a better night-at-the-circus scenario. I got a nice head bang exercise with this track.

Once I got in La Folie, the tour continues with a second track, ‘Guilty Pleasures’, those we all love (to be quite honest). Music elements described above are ongoing, being guitar distortions the pinpoint to this group… it’s not easy to manage those guitar sounds, you know?

‘All aboard’ (third track) is a sincere invitation to a delusional state of mind. An instrumental part leads me to witness how illogical∫ my surroundings can be, like melting down a landscape and just being still, people walking by with silly faces on their way to work; hypocrisy at its prime.

‘Apples’ (fifth track),  a deaf scream is the main feature of this song. There’s a lot going on between apples and the conscious context: a sin. Such collective thought is clear with lyrics as “‘cause we all ate the apples, we ate all the sins.” As sincere as it gets, it’s a hard punch straight to the face.

My favourite track from this whole album is ‘The Incarceration of Mr. Martin Allow’. I’d really love to know what did they mean by “Martin Allow”. As I hear it, this is the highest point of La folie in the album, such a nice drum riff, bass as the melody of drums. There’s always madness and quiet moments in every song, but quiet looks like contemplating suffering and a break within the whole chaos.

‘Svengali’, an interesting name reaffirming the context I got from this band, unease and the dark in human behaviour and soul: a person whose intentions are far from being good and who manipulates another person to get the deed done; an evil hypnotist is afoot. Brilliant tune for a concept created more than one century ago and that’s still part of our every-day life.

Following evil hypnotists, there’s the concept of plastic in “Plastic Parade”, how superficial a human being can be? Well, it seems now this feature in contemporaneous society has found its own soundtrack.

Getting closer to the end of this mad tour, there’s ‘Tramadol’, as the cure for our chronic malaise; la folie may manifest itself in physical pain, a burden we all have but deny to let loose. This track gives an “after tramadol” sensation, going through all stages in the presence of physical pain and getting the “cure” for it. More distorted guitars and irregular beats. Even when medication helps leaving reality for a while, there’s always the hideous need to come back to it,

‘Arachnophobia’ (ninth track): spiders, spider webs, we all feel trapped once in a while, music as an acrobat doing his/her act: flying, putting both life and breath at risk just for the entertainment of the general public, just waiting, when holding on to just a tight rope is in fact getting a grip to life. You might die, but that’s what you get for asking “are you not entertained?”

‘Here comes the flood’, the penultimate track: accepting finally this scenario and also playing by the rules can’t never be “sound”, or what we have been told about being “sound-minded”.

And for the au bientôt track, a final question: what band would dare to name one of their songs as ‘Madame Palm’?, may I say it’s also a very good tune… “what have I become?” There’s a whole despair environment created by the constant sound of circus music and at this point of the album, I think each song would describe one of the famous circus characters for the family entertainment, how insane is that?

And so, ‘Madame Palm’ is the farewell track to this whole concept, where life seems purely illogical, where all sense of good and right falls into contradiction and every listener becomes part of a show full of hypocrisy, evil and what we call reality just fades away and loses its positive angle.

I dare to say I found a perfect soundtrack to the darkest hour of human beings, so difficult to understand and so unpredictable, being the Circus the whole scenario and representative of reality unveiled. Being the Fool is not easy, it takes a lot of observation, study  and deep understanding of human behaviour to mock at them.

Words: Tonan.

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