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Francis - Blue is the Colour of Justice (1999)

Artist: Francis

Author: Sarah

Date: 06/17/2024

Listen: Bandcamp

I happened to stumble across this band while aimlessly looking through Bandcamp yesterday, and I immediately fell in love with the first song on here, "Mechanical Sound". It's one of those indiepoppish songs with slightly noisy (but not too abrasive) guitars and monotone yet tuneful vocals. The exact kind of thing I've always been a sucker for. They add a bit more to it too; providing distorted harmony vocals that sound like they could be what the titular "mechanical sound" is referring to. My limited ability to talk about music really doesn't do it justice; you've just got to hear it, and if you're the right kind of person you'll get exactly what I was talking about.

The other four songs are all instrumental, which only compounds the difficulty I have in saying much about them, unfortunately. I've not really heard much Mogwai, but from what little I have heard, I'd say that's probably a fairly decent comparison to what we have here? There's also a very nice Wedding Present-esque guitar riff at the beginning of "Oceans of Anchovies", and there's some very high and brittle guitar playing in "No. 5" that is reminding me of something I can't quite put my finger on.

As of right now, I would not call this a lost classic by any means. I'm not sure I would even call it a lost good album. But it is a neat little attempt at combining indiepop with post-rock, even if it doesn't quite manage to succeed. Most importantly, it's probably going to be my secret obsession for the next week, which is the highest praise I can offer to any album.