La Volume Courbe - Theodaurus Rex

Photo courtesy of Andrew Kendall

It’s excellent to see La Volume Courbe’s Charlotte Marionneau back releasing music after almost four years absence and there’s no doubt this EP provides an interesting development in a promising career. The ever-modest Frenchwoman has set up a new label, Pickpocket Records, with none other than My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields to distribute the new material. In an interview with Marionneau in 2007 while promoting her last release, Freight Train, she told me working Shields and Hope Sandoval – a connection brokered by former Creation and Poptones boss Alan McGee – rovided a wealth of ideas to work on. Here, Marionneau appears more melancholic than her previous work – released on Honest Jons and Trouble Records – with a dreamy, fragile touch to each of the four tracks. Her broken English proves endearing while there’s a vulnerability (“thank you for everything that you do” on I Love the Living You) that underlines each track. 

The pick of the bunch is Lazy which has a catchy “you’re crazy and lazy, you know how much I love you” refrain and is punctured intermittently with short busts of heavy riffing, strangely thrilling in their bizarre juxtaposition. Elsewhere there’s beautiful violin, a track that featured as the closing track in Nick Moran’s film The Kid last year and artwork which features Belgian surrealist Paul Nouge’s La Bras Revelateur. Plenty to enjoy here.