Lizzy Mercier Descloux – Mambo Nassau

I think someone misunderstood a (Steven) Stanley / (Wally) Badarou credit for backing vocals on Funky Stuff, thereby inventing a brother for Wally named Stanley.

Great sound and mastering, definitely a record for the best sounding records top ten….great air and space and very detailed! Dry and punchy bass!

This is one of the best sounding masters Ive ever heard. Great stuff.

As much Wally Badarou's achievement as la Descloux's masterpiece- here's where it's at in Summer. Spin daily; it'll never go off! A sundrunk punkfunk hi-life dancing over tradition's eggshells extravaganza: nothing more poignantly ersatz counterpoint; nothing more global bassfunk (are Phillipe le Mongne's basslines the most elastic since Jean Jacques Burnel on Peaches or Hanging Around ?) Are you or Lizzy really in Nassau or has she just caught your mood 'sort of?' Here and on the debut 'Press Color', original and off the wall, setting Bjork and more conventional artistes like Madonna up for a lifetime of inspiration; light as a feather, heavy as the Arc de Triomphe, how did this sonic female Picasso raise her iconoclastic nigh-Burroughs volleyball cut-up versus all the prescribed methodologies? Just Mozartian sleight of hand class in a mixer glass getting the disparately out of sync to harmonize. It's perhaps no accident that the guitarist Yahn Leker went on to work with Brian Gysin after his genius acidsplash brushstrokes on here.. So with her grasp of the bigger picture Lizzy ensured Franco-New York music went world class with the most mesmerising sounds on the beach in the postmodern age! Recall like Proust your own childhood, deconstruct and reconstruct it. Can you do it with credibility? Imagine Lizzy at the beach attempting. It's all about fleeting ability to hold onto the moment in time and know you never can and as a child you thought you could. 'You've gotta find it, find it, find it'. Only to find an overbearing paternal controller suppressing freedom n joy. Or take the poetic mind of Sylvia Plath, say, poring over some Long Island youthful beachcombing, as she does in some of her verse, recast through LMD, trying to emulate classic cool singing like Juliette Greco interspersed with a voice as instrument like Piaf, yelping kids' nursery rhymes like lapdogs freed up to show their soul off their lead, yearningly seeking from rootlessness, to show North America and her ex and fellow producer Michel Esteban, aka her Ted Hughes, that she wasn't a chattel and had moved on from New York, now far more capable of strutting her funky stuff and could 'pick it up', that piece of jet or amber amongst the stones etc and fling it and the fusty phallic 'colossus', Shelley's Ozymandias, back into the sand with more freedom than all the faux-macho Studio 54 clowns, in a party in Nassau or on a beach in Nice. She'd got her head out of the oven of Hell's Kitchen.
Poetry in motion? This is the poetess 'into motion'. We feel at one with her emancipation and her band go so over the top trying to keep up with her sometimes floatingly intoxicated vocals and arrangements that they and the listener get giddy: 'just like the whirling, whirling dervishes'. Or a Badarou wurlitzer? The punkier new music Herbie Hancock. Steve Stanley had the main producer credit but his mate Badarou exerts such an influence it's hard to deny him overall control. The synth wizard and co-arranger is on the form of his life to give flesh to Descloux's coastal raid, creating crucial sounds emulating strangely suggestive prototypes of fairgrounds, spinning tops or urgent gyrations spinning a party in one's mind. And through it all the paperchase leads to a disenfranchisement from the shackles of tide and time. Normally brilliant at all he touches, this, alongside work with greats like Wasis Diop and Black Uhuru, 'n his own solo stuff (check 'Echoes')- surely notching up another outstanding triumph. Totally enthralling like nothing you will ever hear or groove to again. Jock 'sports sputniks' running the system are illusory leaders; Lizzy's got 'em clocked n monitored..+she stops, checks where the bass is taking us: far from a 'no wave' movement, off on 'new waves', new paths beckon as geographically Nassau faces Africa. Or does the bass absorb thru earth past spherical encapsulation? I think he is still playing. Hey, just as Descloux stops the engine and restarts the shebang with staccato surprise in many numbers and introduces alternate re-evaluation of rhythm, I must get off, recover- remember I am mortal, grounded as I 'tell it to you'. Admiring from below this generic lp and its mastery of sound-
A fair shout for being at the pinnacle of 80s musical achievements. Rarely do musical experiments do Everything required of them. Badarou and Descloux
mastered it. Everyone else can be damn proud they were on board this particular vessel of love. Thank you! PS respect to Billy Perry again on the credits- the rock solid drummer with metronomic ability, one of the few constants in Lizzy's world- total quality here and on her other albums. Here he's more than ably doubling it up with Yvan 'the enfant terrible' Noe just killing it on percussion. Completely outta dis world; don't Dis Lizzy and da gang she might just come for you spinning on a UFO from where these rhythms emanated!