Sergeant

STROOM continues to spotlight Europe’s oddest operatives with this debut from Belgian avant-pop duo Sergeant, a hybrid post-punk/krautrock band who think of themselves as DJ Shadow in reverse, sampling their own jams and collaging the results into unorthadox songs.

Made up of movie nerd Benjamin Cools and actor Ferre Marnef, Sergeant is a band with cinema in its blood. They approach their songwriting as if they were editing a film, teasing rough loops from their archive of material made with guitars, vocals, drum machines, synths and flutes and compositing them into layered, textural narratives. It’s a process that’s on display from the beginning; ‘Seduced by Each…’ starts with stuttering percussion and psychedelic instrumentation that takes us to Serge Gainsbourg’s Paris via Silver Apples’ New York City. Marnef’s voice is the binding material that makes sense of Sergeant’s lysergic slop – with his words, the song transitions into radio pop despite its gloopy backdrop.

This vague template holds strong across the album’s nine tracks. Marnef makes melancholy post-punk out of reversed drums and echoing guitars on ‘To What Human…’, self-harmonizing over spiraling flutes, and on ‘Not Sensing the World…’ the duo almost sound like a parallel universe Yves Tumor, where the Warp artist managed to reconcile the experimental ‘Serpent Music’ with their later Guardian-baiting run. Needless to say it’s perfect gear for STROOM, who continue to set the standard for coherent eclecticism, throwing caution to the wind and a middle finger up at anyone who expects the same old dreck repackaged again and again.