Our favorite crazy people have put the mask on, not surprising in the current climate. That's not the only news since 6:33 has enlisted former Malemort drummer Cedric "Vicken" Guillo to stop relying on the computer and has made official the status of Bénédicte Pellerin as a full-fledged singer of the band. Many changes in the lives of the musicians partly explain why it took six years for a sequel to "Deadly Scenes" to be written. The French didn't do things by halves by proposing this "Feary Tales For Strange Lullabies: The Dome" as the first part of a diptych with an introspective concept and rich in adventures straight out of Florent "Rorschach" Charlet's boiling brain.
On this "Feary Tales For Strange Lullabies: The Dome", the fundamentals don't evolve. The style of 6:33 is always indefinable, between metal, avant-gardism, funk, disco, film music... The band defines its music as funk-progressive, a necessarily restrictive formula when one is called 6:33 but which has the virtue to describe the big gap that we find in the composition. The beginning is an appetizer in known ground with funk with big saturations for a dancing and devastating 'Wacky Worms' followed by a brassy 'Holy Golden Boner' with delicious exaggerations sung like Mike Patton. A marked turn takes shape from the grandiloquent 'Prime Focus' with its long introduction of big budget movie, its melodies close to A.C.T. and the multiple paintings that he arranges with a breathtaking art of linking. A strong electro dimension leads the track to its final fall and sets the tone for the rest of the record.
It's as if "Feary Tales For Strange Lullabies: The Dome" really started there, at least it's this part of the record that leaves the deepest trace in memory once the listening of the record is over, with a pronounced pop side, numerous electro frames and an exuberant but never overdated 80's tonality. 6:33 literally shines by its easy melodic writing that catches the ear immediately (the unstoppable chorus of 'Party Inc', the disco-technoid 'Release The He-Shes', 'Hot Damn Chicas' carried by a charming Bénédicte) and its mastery of the complexity made accessible (the indus 'Party Inc' or 'Rabbit In The Hat' and its Leprous-like rise). The numerous electro-funk-disco primers echo a whole era that will inevitably speak to the oldest (but not only) and reinforce the charm of this music that takes the best of the past to express it with the codes of today.
In this sequence, metal appears as an element on the same level as the other styles and blends into the general economy of the songs, while leaving the possibility of expressing itself more frankly during live performances, and this may hurt. The riffing plays the role of power gas pedal in a 'Rabbit In The Hat' with the sounds of American series of the last century, the raging and jerky 'Act Like An Animal' or the progressive and epic final 'Hangover'. More than on any other album, 6:33 reaches here a very relevant balance of its forces, juggling with the flow, the groove and the swing, and to muscle more the melodic range of its songs activates a little more the vocal lever of the complementarity with Bénédicte ('Holy Golden Boner', 'Hot Damn Chicas' and 'Hangover') in a less theatrical and more sober register.
Without going so far as to speak about a turn, this new 6:33 has something more tempered and accessible than the previous records. A mixture of wisdom linked to the nostalgia of the passing time and maturity in the knowledge of what one has to express. But "Feary Tales For Strange Lullabies: The Dome" remains a demonstration of audacity in the disorienting assemblies, and always surprising in its control of the musical codes. After long difficult months, this new album of 6:33 is the ideal soundtrack to accompany a semblance of return to normality.