Kap Bambino - Zero Life, Night Vision [Alt>Delete album]

Having soundtracked the infancy of ‘New Rave’ back in the dayglo summer of 2006, Alt Delete unleashes a salvo of electro-punk in the form of the debut long player from Bordeaux’s Kap Bambino. Big things often come in small packages and this duo, comprising Orion Bouvier (bleeps, blips and noise) and Caroline Martial (wailing banshee), manage to make one hell of a racket. The two do their darnedest to replicate on record their apparently incendiary live performances and the result is both pulsating and aggressive.

In this instance the ‘punk’ of their electro-punk comes not from guitars but from the same DIY ethos of early ‘New Rave’ and from the short bursts of furious energy that make up this album. Like the soundtrack to a dystopian world, ‘Zero Life, Night Vision’ is more (or less, depending on which way you look at it) than a collection of ‘songs’, in fact resembling a continual aural assault made up of 12 intense blitzkrieg attacks. Titles like ‘Kaoskillers’ and ‘More Machine’ hint at the band’s future-shock sound, which has a blueprint loosely thus: Bouvier’s bleepy synth sounds over fuzzy noise, with vocodered shrieking vocals courtesy of Martial.

With the origins of ‘New Rave’ buried under Mercury Prizes and Top Shop fashion it is refreshing to hear a band actually indulging in proper ‘old rave’ sounds and ‘Zero Life, Night Vision’ works from a formula that is instantly exciting thanks to its exhilarating aggression. After repeated listens, though, it can seem just that: formulaic.

First published in Notion magazine.