Album review: Odessey & Oracle – Crocorama (Dur et Doux)  – The sun is out and this album, to these most English of ears, sounds deliciously delightfully French in all the best of ways, French with just an undercurrent of (proper) Genesis style sunny 70’s prog. I suspect to French ears it sounds rather different? If it is pop music then it is brilliantly so, intelligently so, it sounds like a a French film, lots of lens flare and sunshine, a film from somewhere around 1972, it sounds like seduction, or maybe too innocent for that, it sounds like Hatfield and The North or Caravan right now, but always with that perfect French voice she has – sung in French, “ambitious and accessible, melodic and untamed, cerebral and physical”, it sounds like a perfect day, it sounds like elderflower cordial, it sounds so refreshing and it would be very very easy to treat Crocorama as some kind of twee piece of retro candy floss, no no no, as fine as these pop songs are, this album is alive with rewarding complexity, with artful ambition and yes, it does tend more towards “experimental chanson” to use the band’s own words. Actually this Odessey & Oracle album is pretty much perfect and yes, “interlacing melodies and impressive psychedelic climates from a varied, blinker-free instrumentarium”. Dur et Doux have done it again, they’re a label that really is delivering again and again at the moment, this latest release, officially out on April 24th, Odessey & Oracle’s Crocorama comes highly recommended (sw).  

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“Dur et Doux is a collective of musicians, a label and a production structure that defends a singular vision of amplified music. Founded in 2008 and carried by thirty or so musicians forming around 15 bands, Dur et Doux praises the unusual, the creation and the innovation, all being nurtured by the singularity of each of its members in order to make them cohabit at the best of their abilities.

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