Aksak Maboul and the recent Figures, plus remainder [limited time only]

For me, one of the big 'touchstones' of progressive rock obviously in the RIO style, one of those artists I return to year after year to enjoy all over again with the immense amount of awesome and incredible creativity that was put into their first two records.

But I was curious to hear some of the post-1980 music to see if it compared favourably with the first two magnificent masterpieces of RIO from Marc Hollander:

The band formed in 1977 by Crammed Discs founder Marc Hollander and his musical partner Vincent Kenis. The aesthetics of Aksak Maboul (deconstructing and fusing many different genres, from rock, jazz, and electronics to fake African, Balkan & minimal music) can retrospectively be viewed as a blueprint for most of the music which was released by Crammed during the next two decades. In the 21st century the band re-assembled around Marc Hollander and Véronique Vincent who is now a prominent member anno 2020, alongside Marc & Véronique's daughter Faustine, Lucien Fraipont and Erik Heestermans. One could argue that the current band is a blend of Aksak Maboul Mk.I and The Honeymoon Killers ...

Coming from the 1980s (but not released in that horrible decade) there was an unreleased (Ex-Futur) album, the 'Made to Measure' contribution, and also a set of unreleased demo-type tracks, which were a bit simplistic in comparison, all released after 2010 in the 'generation z' period, I think, or perhaps we are now in the generation z + 1 stage, let's move on to greek letters perhaps as they did with covid variants so we can really insult these poor generations. (Speaking of which I noticed that called someone a millenial has now become an insult, and I admit to contributing to that greatly.)

However-- in 2020 Mark Hollander made a true follow up in the Aksak style, as you can see from the reviews on discogs:

Exquisite album, very Crammed / Hollander ... and very accessible. And at times also very Stereolab actually. Especially on a handful of songs, e.g. "Splenétique" or "Un caïd". But "Dramuscule" is more like Les Tueurs De La Lune De Miel ... The only remark to be made on this 2cd is that at 39'19" + 36'25" they could have released it on a single disc, using less resources.

This is a fantastic record. Funky, cool weird, hummable, complex. Pressing is excellent. Highly recommended.

The track called Taciturne indeed recalls the music composed more than 40 years prior, quite positively:

The other outstanding song, Sophie la Bevue, reminds me so much of Chanter est Sain from the first Aksak Maboul, could just as well be the same composition, along the lines of my wife's comment "are you sure it's not the same album you keep buying over and over again?" also of those old Joseph Racaille songs from so so long ago on this blog, in fact Racaille was featured close to the debut of this blog:

The one detraction I find is that he could have canned or retired that dumb supermarket organ with the lack of tone sensitivity, it just sounds so dated and even sounded dated in 1978. It really is a distraction for me.