Written By Kevin McSweeney
Listen to them – the children of the Parisian post-hardcore scene. What scar-inflicting music they make!
OK, so LUGOSi might be named in honour of an actor who was famed for portraying fictional monsters, but the horrors depicted throughout the nine tracks on offer here are all too real.
This LUGOSi The Scars review dives into a record that pushes the French post-hardcore band even deeper into trauma, rage, experimentation and uneasy hope.
This makes The Scars a distinctly powerful sophomore album from the frenetic Frenchmen. It is the follow-up to their 2022 debut Inconsolable, and it goes into even deeper and darker territory than its predecessor.
Here, on account of immense personal laziness, I quote directly from the press release:
The Scars’ is a visceral album, addressing both political and personal themes. It explores memory, trauma, and powerlessness, but also the surges of solidarity and hope that help us endure an increasingly violent world. Their punk, post-hardcore, noise-rock and screamo influences blend effortlessly throughout, forming a dense and cathartic whole, where melodies coexist with dissonance and outbursts of rage.
That’s a paragraph that promises a lot. As we shall see with our track-by-track analysis, these claims are not made lightly.
LUGOSi The Scars Review: Track-by-Track
Matches
What makes this opening track so enthralling is the sense that it might all fall apart at any second but never does.
The music is a maelstrom, spinning at high velocity around a solid rhythm section that just about holds it all in place.
It’s a centrifuge of a sound. All members of the band contribute vocals on a song that never settles into one groove but instead constantly wrongfoots you.
The lyrics of Matches are surprisingly wholesome. The match is used as a metaphor for a short-lived hope, one that can be lit briefly to banish darkness, to banish cold, to keep you warm and well lit, if only for a moment.
The narrator’s heart is a box,”…filled with sticks of love and kindness.” It’s not at all what you expect from punk. Maybe if we all follow this example, and we all light little matches of love and hope for each other to offer frequent bursts of warmth and light, bringing comfort in a world that is dark and cold, then we’ll experience widespread deforestation and we’ll all be fucked.
Kate Whispers
It’s a tough listen, this one, with Pieriv Ruys singing like his heart is about to explode. Incidentally, I love the fact that the French accent is always present.
Many vocalists from anywhere outside of America are indistinguishable from actual American singers, but that is not the case here.
Again, it’s capricious in terms of rhythm and pace to keep you on your toes, and though the vocals are melodic in the chorus and roared out elsewhere, the performance is fully committed emotionally throughout.
The titular Kate is a singer whose songs, according to Pieriv Ruys: “save your life when you’re in the dark.” Also, It’s: “…a love song, or rather, a song about what lies beyond love.
When you can no longer stay together, when communication has broken down, but you can’t bring yourselves to say goodbye and you’re trying to build something else.”
The lyrics quote the chorus from Peter Gabriel’s Don’t Give Up, which is performed by Kate Bush. That’ll be the whispering Kate then. He continues: “It’s painful, but there are always songs that save your life.”
The closing lines: “I’ll wait for you somewhere in the horizon/That place where the sun fades,” is far too pretty and poetic for this kind of music, but it’s the perfect way to close such a melancholy song.
The Fire
I thought the previous song was a tough listen, but you’d better brace yourself for this one. It opens with a gut-punching bass riff from Arthur Bercovitz over a syncopated beat from Lucas Joly.
As the guitars kick in, it builds to a frenzy of intricacy that borders on free-form jazz. (I’m not saying jazzcore! I don’t want to and you can’t make me!)
The parts where all instruments are in tight, military formation, echoing a marching beat, is harrowingly apposite, given the subject matter.
Patrick Shirosishi of The Armed makes an appearance for the coda, and it’s a hard-hitting one, though his saxophone solo really doubles down on the free-form jazz.
The quote: “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children,” attributed to “the poet” is one that is familiar to me, and will be to most Irish people.
There are references also to the protest singers Tracy Chapman and Victor Jara, the latter of whom was tortured and executed by the Pinochet regime in Chile. The lyrics are a lament over the seemingly perpetual nature of war and bloodshed, and it could be about any conflict in which innocent people are slain, which is all of them.
However, the lines: “TV tells you who to vote for/What crimes to minimise and who to despise,” would suggest that this is primarily about the horrors we’ve witnessed in Gaza.
I’m tired of saying we’ve seen it all before
The bodies
The fire
The heads
Without a body
And who could fail to be sick and tired of such images? The line: “Borders are drawn with the blood of the innocent” is incredibly powerful. Take note, Mr Sheeran!
Another Downer
We turn to the topic of mental health for this track, which is another subject that has been prominent in the news recently for all wrong reasons.
The pared-down intro of Ruys roaring over a barrage of drums from Joly is effective. When the stringed instruments join in, they bring an air of fraught melody,
At The Drive In-style. We have a sustained period of fast and abrasive D-Beat punk rock. In many ways, it’s the most conventional punk song on offer so far. It is a straightforward articulation of anguish in essence.
I’ve swallowed my pride and choked on tears for way too long
I was promised sweet beautiful songs but I’m still waiting for the sun to come
And the world won’t stop when I’m gone
There’s nothing too subtle about that. It’s a clear and harrowing expression of despair, and it’s potent stuff indeed.
I Must Be Fine
We continue with the mental health theme on this track, and it’s as if they have been fused together, with the last notes of the previous song bleeding into the opening section of this one.
That’s continuity for you, and this song is all about continuity, as in continuing as normal when you are falling apart on the inside.
This is something to which I’m sure we can all relate to some degree. The line: “I must be fine cos’ my heart’s still bleeding,” is effective, suggesting as it does that bleeding, rather than beating, is the normal function of the heart.
Whereas with the line: “we hide the tears with glitter,” I can’t help but be reminded of Smokey Robinson’s Tears of a Clown – a song along similar thematic lines.
I can’t help but be reminded also of System of a Down by the music, with the opening chords and the sombre singing over a restrained 6/8 time rhythm evoking Chop Suey and Toxicity respectively.
It becomes less restrained, of course; something about roaring in a French accent adds a plaintive, almost listless, edge to the anger.
A Taste for Chaos
There’s a sense of irony in the lyrics that I wasn’t expecting. The people of the archipelago from which I hail place great importance on irony, though it seemingly doesn’t cause quite as much delight elsewhere in the world. It’s manna from Heaven for me whenever I find it, so I particularly enjoyed the following lines:
…love’s the only thing worth dying for
Apart maybe from the revolution or shitloads of money
I also found a small amount of irony in the following lines, given the band’s approach to music.
The beat hits hard but I beat myself harder
Well you know what they say, play 4/4 motherfucker
They show at times a willingness to explore unorthodox time signatures that verges on progressive rock, and occasionally they seek seemingly to operate outside of all spatio-temporal constraints. There’s no automatic resort to 4/4 here, motherfucker!
There’s times in this song when they move towards a more sludge-adjacent approach than anything I’ve heard from them previously.
A few of these riffs could have come from the fretboard of Kirk Windstein. And keeping it Southern, we also have a hint of a country/skiffle-style train snare beat. I certainly wasn’t expecting that. There’s a breakdown in there as well, which is less unexpected.
Ghosts of Christmas Past
The drum intro to this song is exquisite. In fact, I want to run to the nearest drum kit to see if I can replicate it. (I probably can’t.)
Much of the track is fast, aggressive punk rock with only the occasional resort to the mathy Dillinger Escape Plan malarky. The high bass and stick clicks towards the end take the track somewhat into grebo territory.
It reminds me slightly of Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, which is not something I ever expected to say of a French band.
Like Type O Negative’s Red Water (Christmas Mourning), it’s using a yuletide theme as a means of coming to terms with the cruel nature of our mortality.
It’s a disconcerting tale, but that could be said of pretty much everything on this album. I might have to go and listen to Blind Melon’s No Rain afterwards to cheer myself up, only to become sad again once I remember how young Shannon Hoon was when he succumbed to his own mortality.
…and Nothing Hurt
I’m not sure I believe the title. This’ll be one of those unreliable narrator devices, I reckon. Anyway, the track mixes raging hardcore with quieter, jazzy moments adorned with intricate drumming and jangly guitars.
It’s certainly a workout for Lucas Joly. Whether it’s fast punk or intricate jazz, either way the drummer is putting in a shift.
I’m struck in particular by the line: “too old to succeed; too young to die.” I can certainly relate to that. There was a reference to not being too young to die in the previous track, so that’s thrown me slightly. The following lines remind me of the handiwork of Morrissey for some reason:
Survival is expensive, victory is rare
I’m taking off the gloves, I’m done with fighting
Victory’s expensive, survival is rare
And the scars look very different today
I could imagine them being sung to the tune of something like What Difference Does It Make? Nothing sums up the lyrics of this album quite like the line: “I’ve blackened pages and pages with words of sadness and despair.” Morrissey would approve, I suspect.
Everything Ends
And indeed it does, including this album. The final track alternates between At The Drive In-style emotionally charged post-hardcore and an intricate, jazzier sound, just as it alternates vocally between full-throated roars and spoken-word diatribes.
Oddly, it gets more and more melodic as it builds to a crescendo towards the end, with a barrage of drums under plaintive guitars from Adrian Verdier and Fabien Claes. Then, Everything Ends comes to an end with softly spoken words over clean strummed guitar and the sweetest melody in show.
It’s a strange way to bring to an end an album that has left me browbeaten with its torment and pain.
So, that’s LUGOSi, a band that is unafraid to paddle its own canoe down the Seine. The tender and touching lyrics are in stark contrast to many hardcore or indeed post-hardcore albums.
As this LUGOSi The Scars review makes clear, the album is abrasive, emotionally demanding and fiercely committed to doing things its own way.
For example, there’s the most significant post-hardcore album of my younger years: Glassjaw’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence. This album once articulated my youthful angst.
Nowadays, it’s hard not to see the attitudes towards women expressed therein as bordering on misogyny. I’ve therefore had to renounce it. There’s no need to take any such stance towards Lugosi, however. For all the pain articulated therein, we have no such forays into offensive territory.
Now for the negatives. The trouble with such an avant-garde approach and spirit of experimentation is that it comes at the expense of hooks to draw you in or grooves to make you dance. You might do yourself a mischief trying to dance to rhythms and tempos that are changing constantly and all over the place.
Though singles were released from the album, there’s not really anything that stands out as obvious single material, and that’s on top of the fact that it’s a heavy emotional listening experience.
Still, we commend them for their courage and independent spirit, and their willingness to stand out in a scene that is permeated with testosterone.
Metal Lair awards The Scars by LUGOSi three and a half devil horns out of five.
Stream on Apple Music HERE.
Stream on Deezer HERE.
Stream on Tidal HERE.
Track Listing:
1. Matches
2.Kate Whispers
3.The Fire (feat. Patrick Shiroishi)
4.Another Downer
5.I Must Be Fine
6.A Taste for Chaos
7.Ghosts of Christmas Past
8.and Nothing Hurt
9.Everything Ends
Line-up
Fabien Claes : Guitar, Piano, Vocals
Adrian Verdier : Guitar, Vocals
Arthur Bercovitz : Bass, Keyboard, Vocals
Lucas Joly : Drums, Vocals
Pieriv Ruys : Lead Vocals
Lugosi Online:
About The Author
Kevin McSweeney is Metal Lair’s resident scribe of the underground, eternally rummaging through the global metal scene for riffs worth your time.
As the guiding hand behind Seven Deadly Songs every Friday, he has an uncanny knack for finding the track you didn’t know you needed, usually before finishing his pint.
Equal parts loyal, kind, and quietly razor-witted, Kevin brings deep knowledge, impeccable taste, and a steady, reliable presence to Metal Lair.
Read More From This Author:
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EVERY TIME I DIE GUITARIST PASSES AT JUST 48
ALBUM REVIEW: GREEN CARNATION – A DARK POEM, PART III: THE MESSIAH COMPLEX
Album Review: To No Avail by Xenith
Album Review: Made Flesh by Untitled With Drums
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