Carmen 404

With this fourth album, the French-ish quartet Lolomis continue to provide high-grade, adventurous splicings of hard electronics and sylvan folk. They remain constant yet unstable, refining their sonic collisions, where neither the acoustic (fragile harps, wooden flutes) or electric (bass rending, synth evisceration) end up compromised. Few combos manage to thread such extremes into unified song forms. These tracks emanate equal sympathy for the twinkling camp fire or the concrete Berlin club. Forceful, dark, splintered and kaleidoscopically multilingual (nine languages!), Lolomis have singer Romane Claudel-Ferragui very much to the fore, spiky vocals leaping with agile aggression across the savage beats, spreading across the sonic canopy. The songs are mostly curt and concise, in and out, making their sharp marks. This industrial folk is strikingly overloaded, often with a suffocating power. Lolomis have now been consistently impressive for almost a decade.