The Missing Season, “The Last Summer” (My Little Cab Records, 2012)
Last summer I gave you my heart, but the very next season, you gave it away
Screw that tentative of a pun on the opening line, it’s not even remotely funny. Like this record. One of my favorite bands from the always thriving French depressive but not depressing music scene has put out their 3rd album earlier in the year, but the only thing that made me sad about it is that I only got around to listen to it properly by now. Probably because I’m not really a melancholic person, though: I just seem to enjoy gloomy stuff in order not to be so happy and be able to fit in my circle of urban depressive, The National-worshipper friends.
But this isn’t a post about me; I’m talking about The Missing Season, a duo comprised of songwriters Nicolas Gautier and Marin Pérot who, like me (and this was the last time I mentioned myself in this post), probably spent countless hours of their lives listening to Dakota Suite, Low, Codeine or Red House Painters and getting to know them so well that they managed to craft a sound so close, yet so distinctive from each of those bands, rejecting the whole (unfortunately well spread) idea of cloning. On “Could It Be”, one of the highlights here, Gautier and Pérot teach you how to use a synth with great success in a band whose fanbase probably doesn’t like synthesizers at all and that fact alone is enough for me to praise this album. But by the ending part of the album, “Mystic Candle”, which seems to be some sort of hopeless, farewell song, reveals itself as possibly the best this duo has ever done.
Even though the whole of The Last Summer is not consistently as great as those two standout songs, it’s still worth taking a listen and paying a couple of bucks for the digital download (although you can get it for free on their Bandcamp page embedded below). I can’t name five slowcore albums as good as this one being put out in the latest couple of years. But give me five more like this, and it’s 1995 again.
DSS
