Cannibale – No Mercy For Love LP Born Bad (France)

Still unknown in rock territory, French band CANNIBALE gets its name from its “kind of exotic garage” music whose humid tropical groove is slowly eating up all the stereotypes about Born Bad Records releases. If there’s cannibalism to be found in No Mercy For Love, it’s in reference to the Caribbean rhythms here-and-there, and to the psychedelic sound from the backwoods that make this first album a peculiar occurrence in the land of strikes and wine drinkers. There’s never any silence with Cannibale and, as for the lambs, stick to the village in the middle of nowhere where the band members reside—a hamlet in Normandy with a total population of 300, including the cows. Rather than human flesh, these guys have been feeding on their own impatience. Lead guitarist MANUEL and singer NICOLAS met in junior high, but the members of Cannibale have a Frustration type profile—almost all of them are over forty. During the last twenty years, with unbending faith, these guys played in loads of bands that never made it to the top (AMIB, DE RIEN, 7QUESTIONS, KOUYATE NEERMAN, RENZA BO, BLAST) and even ended up playing as session musicians alongside Camile Bazbaz or Johnny Halliday. After winning the Inrocks Labs contest with BOW LOW, their penultimate band, and releasing two albums with Because, the Norman guys finally decided to create Cannibale in 2016. In theory, considering the beginning of their career, or lack thereof, you couldn’t imagine you’d end up hearing the sounds from No Mercy For Love: a surprising mixture of cumbia, African rhythms and garage music. Or, if you will, a kind of missing link between Fela Kuti, The Doors, and The Seeds. A bunch of forty year-olds whose origins are as white as their soul is black.