Initials MB - Bang Bang ! (2023) Hi-Res

You miss the time. Bits and pieces of a faded past catch up with you without their memories even reaching you. Images of outdated Westerns come to mind. Dark atmospheres, candlelit scenes where the dialogue oscillates between seriousness and virile demonstrations tinged with humour. A language that Audiard would not have disowned. Melancholy, emphasis, grandiloquence, then nostalgia again. What’s happening to you? Your bearings become blurred, you admit to having experienced these sensations before, but you can’t say where or when. Is your memory playing tricks on you? Was it a scene from a film or an actual moment? That’s it, you’re hooked. Initials MB can make you relive scenes you’ve never experienced before. This multi-instrumentalist has a love of the sounds of the sixties and seventies, and above all a cheeky ease of reproducing them that’s almost self-evident.

Maxime Baderspach, his real name, spent a long time favouring guitar riffs and fast tempos before (re)discovering a real passion for 60s and 70s film soundtracks. After two solo albums focusing on the pop of those mythical, fantasised years, he has surrounded himself with spontaneous guests from the Lyon scene: Rémy Kaprielan on drums, Léa Vignoud and Roxane Boucher on flute, and Sandrine Hanart and Thibauld Labey from Trumpets of Consciousness on Morriconian backing vocals. We won’t insult you by explaining where the pseudonym Initals MB comes from. Fans of the master songwriter Gainsbourg will find certain accents and tics of his work in Growly Owl, a track with patient, doctored pianos that could easily remind us of a bar scene starring Jean Gabin. Are you more of a spaghetti man? Melancholia will take you back to the melodic flights of Morricone’s genius. J’irai à Roubaix (I’m going to Roubaix), on the other hand, takes us right back to the François of Roubaix.

Initials MB has no desire to sound retro. On the contrary, the psychedelic elements in their work, the melodic, incisive bass, the hypnotic grooves, the Hammond organs and spinet, are all part of their natural musical language. It’s a fetish for these sounds that never turns into a pastiche. Initals MB, inspired more by the music than the lyrics, composes instrumentals for imaginary films, playing with the monolithic codes and immutable constraints of the genre; here a catchy theme never returns, there a structure takes non-linear winding paths. Your spirits return. You’re beginning to miss the warmth of the world you’re leaving behind. Don’t worry, just carefully turn the record over to present the B-side to your diamond and “Bang, Bang” you’re off again