Heal All Monsters & Nicholson Vinyl Reissue
From CHF 39.00
Honey for Petzi returns. (A little) more than a decade after the last album of the trio from Western Switzerland (General Thoughts and Tastes, 2011), let’s celebrate today the release, by Two Gentlemen again, of “Observations + Descriptions”, featuring twelve tracks of frank, agile and evolving emotions – as if cut with a sharp and subtle knife.
The trio, consisting of Sami Benhadj Djilali (guitar and vocals), Philippe Oberson (bass and vocals) and Christian Pahud (drums and vocals), emerged in Lausanne at the end of the 20th century. At the time, the post-rock scene was blooming and Honey for Petzi added its own corolla with their geometric music, featuring rhythmic phrasings that highlight weak beats, pitfalls and syncopations, a gripping sound and unexpected harmonic progressions. This aesthetic was to undergo several mutations in the course of the band’s outstanding records – in particular “Heal All Monsters” (produced by Steve Albini, no less) and “Nicholson” (2003), both on Two Gentlemen.
Let’s hear it from the band: “We picked up where we left off with General Thoughts and Tastes. It was an album that already featured tracks exclusively with vocals, more ‘pop’ formats than we had done before.” The ethereal subtlety of other tracks on Observations + Descriptions (like Infini, or Dog even), with their heart-wrenching chords, testifies to this inflection, which coincides moreover with some more risk-taking: “What is new in this latest album is the (significant) presence of tracks sung in French.” This is a fertile step, which brings us right into the poetry of Benhadj Djilali, Oberson and Pahud: something that is at once a form of attention to detail, semi-automatic writing and melancholy, even elegiac ecstasy at times.
“Observations + Descriptions”, and this is its tour de force, manages to bring together these paths that one would think parallel, why not divergent even, in a more than coherent unity or confluence. It is perhaps, quite simply, a definition of identity: maintaining a powerful heart under the multiplicity of its movements.
Honey for Petzi returns. (A little) more than a decade after the last album of the trio from Western Switzerland (General Thoughts and Tastes, 2011), let’s celebrate today the release, by Two Gentlemen again, of “Observations + Descriptions”, featuring twelve tracks of frank, agile and evolving emotions – as if cut with a sharp and subtle knife.
The trio, consisting of Sami Benhadj Djilali (guitar and vocals), Philippe Oberson (bass and vocals) and Christian Pahud (drums and vocals), emerged in Lausanne at the end of the 20th century. At the time, the post-rock scene was blooming and Honey for Petzi added its own corolla with their geometric music, featuring rhythmic phrasings that highlight weak beats, pitfalls and syncopations, a gripping sound and unexpected harmonic progressions. This aesthetic was to undergo several mutations in the course of the band’s outstanding records – in particular “Heal All Monsters” (produced by Steve Albini, no less) and “Nicholson” (2003), both on Two Gentlemen.
Let’s hear it from the band: “We picked up where we left off with General Thoughts and Tastes. It was an album that already featured tracks exclusively with vocals, more ‘pop’ formats than we had done before.” The ethereal subtlety of other tracks on Observations + Descriptions (like Infini, or Dog even), with their heart-wrenching chords, testifies to this inflection, which coincides moreover with some more risk-taking: “What is new in this latest album is the (significant) presence of tracks sung in French.” This is a fertile step, which brings us right into the poetry of Benhadj Djilali, Oberson and Pahud: something that is at once a form of attention to detail, semi-automatic writing and melancholy, even elegiac ecstasy at times.
“Observations + Descriptions”, and this is its tour de force, manages to bring together these paths that one would think parallel, why not divergent even, in a more than coherent unity or confluence. It is perhaps, quite simply, a definition of identity: maintaining a powerful heart under the multiplicity of its movements.
"Honey for Petzi returns. (A little) more than a decade after the last album of the trio from Western Switzerland (General Thoughts and Tastes, 2011), let’s celebrate today the release, by Two Gentlemen again, of “Observations + Descriptions”, featuring twelve tracks of frank, agile and evolving emotions – as if cut with a sharp and subtle knife.
The trio, consisting of Sami Benhadj Djilali (guitar and vocals), Philippe Oberson (bass and vocals) and Christian Pahud (drums and vocals), emerged in Lausanne at the end of the 20th century. At the time, the post-rock scene was blooming and Honey for Petzi added its own corolla with their geometric music, featuring rhythmic phrasings that highlight weak beats, pitfalls and syncopations, a gripping sound and unexpected harmonic progressions. This aesthetic was to undergo several mutations in the course of the band’s outstanding records – in particular “Heal All Monsters” (produced by Steve Albini, no less) and “Nicholson” (2003), both on Two Gentlemen.
Let’s hear it from the band: “We picked up where we left off with General Thoughts and Tastes. It was an album that already featured tracks exclusively with vocals, more ‘pop’ formats than we had done before.” The ethereal subtlety of other tracks on Observations + Descriptions (like Infini, or Dog even), with their heart-wrenching chords, testifies to this inflection, which coincides moreover with some more risk-taking: “What is new in this latest album is the (significant) presence of tracks sung in French.” This is a fertile step, which brings us right into the poetry of Benhadj Djilali, Oberson and Pahud: something that is at once a form of attention to detail, semi-automatic writing and melancholy, even elegiac ecstasy at times.
“Observations + Descriptions”, and this is its tour de force, manages to bring together these paths that one would think parallel, why not divergent even, in a more than coherent unity or confluence. It is perhaps, quite simply, a definition of identity: maintaining a powerful heart under the multiplicity of its movements.