Montreal pure blood

Montreal's Les Georges Leningrad works entirely in its own world, a place of crudely hand-drawn cover art, song titles that span four languages, lengthy musical romps that lead everywhere and nowhere, and an overall indifference to whatever may be happening on the outside. "Outside" being our own universe, of course. Fortunately, Sangue Puro, its second full-length, offers a window into the noise Les Georges calls home. While its previous album, Sur Les Traces De Black Eskimo, featured plenty of wanking and petulant keyboard runs to dance the night away, the latest outing finds Les Georges in a different, darker mood (though there's still plenty of wanking). Vocals are unintelligible — or possibly just French — and ever-present fuzz guitar licks flit like flies out of the digital ether. Book-ended by voiceless sound experiments, Sangue Puro also includes spazzy go-go jams like "Mammal Beats" — something meant for the dancefloor, but punctuated by the trumpets and roars of elephants and tigers. Elsewhere, "Eli Eli Lamma Sabachtani" (Aramaic for "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" and supposedly Christ's final words) is a percussion-led chant that makes you want to slap on some face paint and howl around a bonfire. Self-dubbed a "petrochemical rock trio," Les Georges Leningrad is decidedly sangue puro, or "pure blood" as the phrase translates from Italian. Whose blood is anyone's guess.

Ben Blackwell writes about music for Metro Times . Send comments to [email protected].