Le peuple de l'herbe

You can tell the sound of Le Peuple de l'Herbe after two bars, whatever genre the band tries its hand at. Heavy, steady turns syncopated by razor-edged breaks that subtly draw your attention somewhere else, but just enough to create a disturbing imbalance without losing momentum. Combine with brass or vintage sounds and samples from all sorts, and you get that seemingly obvious, yet simple formula delivered only by Le Peuple.

With A Matter of Time, the band releases its most explicitly groove album, with 13 tracks unabashedly borrowing the alternative structures of tension and release typical of funk and rock, craftily remastered to form a peaceful collusion between rage and enthusiasm, pop, wah-wah, mastery and energy.
It is as if the pulse of 'back-in-the-day' had made them want to open up the windows wide to deliver a series of tracks which take us over the moon. No one expected that much from a band whom we thought had already given their best, but that was simply overlooking the very palpable pleasure they take in doing what they do- knowing how to make those hips move.

This album is 100% Le Peuple, pushing the possibilities to the max: they've aged, without showing signs of fatigue. Listening to the skilful 19 we feel something has broken loose, exploded. We recognize the sound, but the sheer height of the wave is surprising, and we give into it joyfully. Their music has lost none of its defining complexity and has kept its characteristic trademark, but it has plunged deep into the hearts and souls of riotous cities filled with gleaming rage, eagerness and restlessness. The album is all about entertaining ,enjoying and knowing how to make the grass rumble under our feet, with a thundering blast that livens our very core.

Parler Le Fracas is the first step of the band on the French hip-hop scene and it may also be the best of its kind. Working with singer Marc Nammour from La Canaille has worked out brilliantly with a steady, husky, heady flow, backed up by early 90's vinyl scratches singed by electro samples. Maybe that ability to combine erudition, with sounds from hip-hop at its musical best, along with a definite taste for sounds from the third millennium which enhance extremely modern lyrics can account for the fact that, after five albums, Le Peuple are never redundant. They're neither conservative nor unlearned, never stuck in their classics, they can avoid clichés and still don't hesitate to mess around with references, making all compositions on the record wicked, because they acknowledge their roots, without ever fading into nostalgic schmaltz. Le Peuple keeps on revisiting the old classics, still producing a sound firmly anchored in the third millennium.
With Mothership and Let Us Play, all members of the band –drums, sampling, vocals, bass and scratch– push their thing to the limit, producing two masterpieces of pure funk which stand out as accessible, conclusive compositions whose plainness cleverly avoids déjà-vu, and flatter both body and soul, without insulting our better judgement. Greeted and blessed with that same enthusiasm, the furiously dancey New Day or the heady Jasmin In The Air are immediate hits that also manage to steer clear of the beaten track.

The record takes us from one surprise to another, and so the electro 80's Numbers takes off with a quick, high-spirited virtuoso hip-hop and a chorus sweeps in like a whirlwind and keeps on spinning, leaving us all worked up and happy to be so. There then remain little wonders like the orientalist electro Wooden Jam, which is yet another example of Le Peuple's expertise when it comes to clever hybridization, or the powerful spoken word A Matter Of Time and its intimist, dark, emotional and dramatic vibes which could convince us to follow Le Peuple if ever they decided to walk the dark wave path.

When we listen to A Matter Of Time it is hard to believe that this is the sixth album of a fourteen-year-old band. There is just too much energy overflowing, too great a sense of emergency, too much risk-taking and creativity for a band that has had nothing to prove for a long time. Tour after tour, Le Peuple pack venues in France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany. Self- produced records, released from their own studios grace the ears of new listeners and still delight the regular ones. Remarkably ignored by mainstream media -we could almost talk of consecration at this stage- the collective has quietly built up its own special identity in a quiet, peaceful, continuous resistance movement, which has proved very fruitful. A Matter Of Time fits perfectly: everything comes to those who keep finding pleasure in being good at what they do.

Virginie Despentes