It’s been three years since the critically acclaimed ‘1999’ was released, but don’t expect the same again from a band that has been described as “the missing link in French dance music”. The previous album, ‘1999’ was recorded during a three-week period in the summer of 1998 and was released the subsequent year. A blend of bass, house and techno ‘1999’ was a seminal album, encapsulating the continental mood of the dance music scene at the time.
But times change and so have Cassius.
They told Crud a few months ago that they had the urge to make a timeless album – and though patently rooted in late seventies, early eighties complex funk, it does indeed to flaunt the usual band curdling drama of period.
A complex, yet organic sounding album ‘Au Reve’ works on many musical levels – and not all of them that far removed from the thumb-happy slapping of Level 42 at a time when they were uncharacteristically authentic and sound judges of direction. From the bass-driven soul of present single ‘Sound of Violence’ (with its mesmerising single shoot video) to the more recognisable techno sounding Cassius on ‘Telephone Love’.
It’s an album that is as subtle as it is chaotic, and though side-stepping the defensive, inexorable kitsch-irony of bands like ‘Daft Punk’ and Air, ‘Au-Reve’ provides a cool alternative funk reality: both invoking and dispelling the ghosts of the past.