SOULWAX, MUCH AGAINST EVERYONE'S ADVICE.

Belgian by birth, American by heart & free by nature, Soulwax is the most imaginative lace maker of Ghent !

Belgium has long been merely a principality on rock's world map - a country which was withdrawn into itself, a victim of the Nordic syndrome which was living on its local musical production (from the Names to the Scabs) & perfectly incapable of giving birth to more than 2 music groups solid enough to cross borders every ten years.

Until recently, the proud Belgian talking about rock music when holidaying abroad would only mention TC Matic's epic at the very beginning of the eighties or the disrupting irruption of Front 242 in the electronic circus.

Ever since, the sun has risen on the dull land of Europe's soft belly, in Antwerp of course when Deus then Zita Swoon have kicked this small conservatism's bottom & built a tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean.

In Ghent, the Soulwax Four understood the importance of the breach & took immediately their ticket to California. In L.A., Soulwax found its musical Eldorado. There the bulimic Belgians overused everything, without moderation but with clear mindedness, as if this second album "Much against everyone's advice" was to be the last. The excellent opening doublet, conversation Intercom/Saturday, leaves no doubt about it : Soulwax wants to play the leading part & force the wild & crazy blues of Jon Spencer upon the sound power of the Smashing Pumpkins. This impression is confirmed a few minutes later with "Everyone's advice", a song the Foo Fighters would have made one of their main pieces. And yet, you wonder if Dave Grohl would have had the breath necessary to reach this serenity in the art of melodic full-contact. Spite-ridden, he never had the sense of depth developed by Soulwax, as well as the notion of perspective & this consciousness of receding lines which led these Belgians to contain pure energy into 3 songs, then to pursue an oblique pop music, owing as much to Television (for its chromatic rudeness & dry lines, as in The Salty Knowledge) as to Jeff Buckley (for the blues expressionism & the tottering construction of harmonies balanced above emptiness), or again to the great tradition of strings pop. Jason Falkner here took care of the arrangements (When logic dies, Proverbial pants, Scream). In this maze of meanings, this episodic construction with several entries, you could fear several times that Soulwax would lose their way, lapse into gratuitous exposition or pure aesthetic show-off. But no need to be afraid ! It's precisely here that Soulwax members remind us that they are Belgian, used to multilingualism & endowed with an innate sense of selection & subtleties, which already allows them to be on an equal footing with Deus without feeling embarrassed.

Marc Besse, March 31st, 1999, Les Inrockuptibles.