Beep. Thud. Krash. The reanimated remains of a drum machine rampage onto the record, crying out with the tormented bark of an illiterate Speak & Spell. It’s alive, it’s angry, and it’s coming right at you. Funkenstein grabs you by the ear and drags you through a chromed-out hellscape of Whirs and Pings to the intro’s still-beating-heart. Inside, there’s a piano, and a furry yellow paw outstretched from above like God creating Adam; it strikes a single key--and again, and again, and again, and again. “Bonjour!” he calls, via text-to-speech. “This is me again--Mr. Oizo.”

 

“You are about to hear a collection of some recorded stuff. 

Some are good. 

Some are bad. 

Some are just OK.”

 

“Hun” is only the first of the 18 jagged magazine-clipped letters that hastily compose Lambs Anger--a work more ransom note than album. It’s a brutal melange of house, punk, and power pop swept up from the cutting room floor and left “(Unfinished)”. It’s a scathing, jeering cartoon that taps into some unseen truth of the Information Age—a towering asphalt effigy to the search for meaning through art that smashes itself to rubble. It’s funny, it’s crude, it stinks; it’s the ugly duckling of the French touch movement. Critically-panned as “tooth-grindingly obnoxious machine noise” for which “there’s not enough cocaine in the whole wide world” (out of context, this sure sounds like high praise to me), Lambs Anger is Mr. Oizo’s opus. It’s good bad.

 

In the very same hit-piece that betrays his inexperience with cocaine, the very petulant Brian Howe stares directly past the point, explaining that the album makes him “wonder if Oizo is secretly a minimalist trying to destroy French house from the inside.” Maybe, if he wasn’t so busy patting himself on the back and pretending to do cocaine, Howe would realize that the glitzy, glitchy, bone-broke baroque maximalism of Lambs Anger is doing exactly that--preying on and prodding at the unstable opulence and fleeting “cool” of French touch. Oizo’s cluttered, garish, caustic funk delivers the idyllic, touched-up nu-Disco of his contemporaries expressly to its logical conclusion, advancing a new style capable of reflecting the unpredictable and ceaseless change characteristic of 21st century living. The irreverent, apocalyptic sound of songs like “Cut Dick'' doesn't need a heavy filter and steady four-on-the-floor backbeat to make you want to bust a move; rather, it tells you to find fun in life through all its barbarism and badness. Oizo teaches you to delight in the sweet immediacy of the aggressively unpolished. It sounds good because it sounds bad.

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So--why look down your nose when you could scrunch it up in a squint and “get on up and dance” to the chopped-up, bouncy, shrieking soul-diva reboot on “Gay Dentists”? Why whine about “incoherence” and “structural deficiency” when you can get down to the anthemic, whooping sirens of “Bruce Willis is Dead”? Lambs Anger will tear you to ribbons--why fight the feeling? If you’re lucky, Oizo might just make something good bad out of your scraps, too.