Lizzy Mercier Descloux: Best Off (ZE)

In 1979, NYC's ultrahip ZE Records issued Press Color, the debut album of
Parisienne expat painter et post-punkette Lizzy Mercier Descloux. It was pretty good
punky funky no (-ish) wave. But the most striking thing about the early songs
invited to ZE's new Lizzy fair, Best Off, is the way their parsing paisley parsley
and bodyhair telegraphy grow through the French, South American, Caribbean and
African elements of LDM's Eiffel of a peak. For instance, Best Off offers a
juicy slice of 1984's Soweto-collaborative, bollocks-to-apartheid Zulu Rock, which ZE
has also reissued, with several bonus tracks. Wherever
she goes, Descloux sounds far too at home to be satisfied, but there's a
nervous delight in her flight, though it's never unsteady. She often suggests the
artist as discreetly caffeinated spectator, responding to the multiplying
dimensions in her pulsating frames. Descloux (who moved to the West Indies in the
90s, and kept painting, right up until her 2004 death from cancer) even molds
bullets from samples of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker's narcotic blue satori,
which remains undisturbed, of course. Opposites attract, eternally.(ZE site still
"under construction" last time I checked, so for instance see
http://www.forcedexposure.com) Don Allred

(update: in 2016, Pitchfork published Laura Snapes' informative,, insightful, incisive profile of LMD: http://pitchfork.com/features/from-the-pitchfork-review/9828-lizzy-mercier-descloux-behind-the-muse/)