As we know, first times are always the most powerful: the shattering rush of revelation can only be experienced once. After that it's all an inevitable, exhausting quest for repetition, a feverish search for the original shock, and pointless reiteration and accumulation poisoned by consciousness, analysis and age: and such a sensation keeps fading as we experience it. 2018's garage band #1001 will look and sound the same as the preceding one, and leave you wondering - half-sorry, half-dismayed - how on earth listening to the Sonics and the Standells could electrify you back in the days. Likewise, you can count on the fingers of one hand the bands you've loved up until their 5th album like J.C. Satàn - almost ten years after falling in love. We all already know dudes who have "seen them too much", heard them too much and stopped expecting anything from them anymore. Except that_ Except that those folks are in for a big-time surprise, as the Satàn crew did not deliver a 5th album just for the hell of it, just to justify their next tour: they got together to seek the rare fuel, the miraculous current able to galvanize our sleeping senses, the electroshock forcing us to revive the urgent impression of being alive. Centaur Desire has something of a new first-time record - recorded all together (Arthur and Dorian used to handle all instruments themselves), enhanced by an incredibly powerful sonority (gear has piled up over the last years), and filled with a new groove (Romain finally plays his drum parts, and it's fantastic). Never where you'd expect it, Paula's voice adds to the pervading climate of freshness. A true panacea, in the alchemists' sense - that universal remedy that gives sight back to the blind, hearing back to the deaf and youth back to old jaded bodies. A formula had to be found, that combines an undeniable talent for composition with devastating live fury - the laboratory residue of which, on the vinyl sieve, had always seemed a bit staid. Here it is, and some of this on-stage gold stabili...
