The first few times I played the CD I was totally wowed on several levels: the low-key finesse and style of LMD's French dance-punk music, its occasionally credible disco energy, and especially by the mystery of how the heck I had not noticed LMD before?! Many listens later, and having read Vivien Goldman's illustrative liner notes, I realize LitAR and Michel Esteban, co-founder of ZE Records and LMD's long-time creative partner going back to her roots in France, deserve a lot of credit for the revelation of the music packaged all together on this reissue. And if you have any interest in Goldman's musical bailiwick, the global intersection of post-punk, arty punk with funk, reggae, disco and Latin musical gestures, and in particular those vintage post-punk years of '78 and '79 this reissue collection is an essential add to your musical library.
Actually, the original Press Color album had already crossed my radar in the 2000s but briefly and mildly dismissively. The album is only 24 minutes long, breaking rock era conventions and making the album billing feel like a little hype. There's one passible post-punk novelty, Arthur Brown's "Fire" reimagined quite effectively (very rare) as a disco song. The signature "disco" sound of a looped electronic bassline provided by guest Moog synth guy Alan Wentz. I actually might have heard this one randomly somehow in the early '80s, it has that kind of vague familiarity, but it left no great impression. The rest of the EP is whimsical, musical, DIY post-punk, flatteringly kindred to what the Raincoats were doing about the same time on the other side of the Atlantic but without the poignant dark punk social realist turns.
But this LitAR Deluxe Edition-- and must say I've not been impressed by a lot of DE's before-- compiles all LMD's earliest recordings from 1978 and 1979 on ZE Records into something more like a real album in length, 46 minutes, and a more emphatically whole expression of LMD's music in this period. LMD was generally billed then as No Wave, part of a crowd of artists that hung around CBGB's and The Kitchen. She flirted with reggae and Afrobeat like many post-punkers in her day.
(Sidebar: What are the greatest examples of people from loosely associated No Wave crowd making good disco or dance club music? Arthur Russell's Dinosaur L "Go Bang!" or Liquid Liquid's "Cavern" (both '82) come to mind but not many others? Let's also mention here Delta 5's No Wave adjacent Brit post-punk classic, "Mind Your Own Business," the original and in later EDM remixes.)
Tracks 1-8, the '79 Press Color album, makes up actually less than half the tracks on the LitAR reissue CD. Added on, presumably Esteban had a big hand in what gets packaged together here, are all LMD's recorded output from '78 and '79. A six-song EP of her No Wave edgy performance art duo experiments with guitarist D.J. Barnes, Tracks 10-15, from '78. And then tracks 9, and 16-18, were never released until 2003 but at least two of them for sure, and one of those, "Hard-Boiled Babe," has to be the single best song here, were recorded in 1979 but unfathomably never released back then. And then the last track, "Morning High," is some sort of reprise of a LMD collaboration with Patti Smith from the mid-'90s, re-commemorating their mutual affection for 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud. Which arguably still fits this '78-'79 retrospective because, turns out, LMD was already hanging out creatively now and then with Patti Smith in the 1970s (see photo).
Again, news to this rube but LMD first visits NYC as a wee 17-year old French teenager in 1975, writes a book of poetry and illustrations called Desiderata with the help of rock luminary Patti Smith, and was also a favorite love muse of NYC punk rock icon Richard Hell. I don't know if this qualifies her for NYC's 1970s art rock Hall of Fame but she's definitely getting shout-outs at the induction ceremonies.
Looking at Desiderata as an old geezer now, and an agnostic know-nothing about poetry, it strikes me as blunt and energetic but maybe a slight work in the NYC's '70s literary canon? Patti Smith's introduction sets the stakes pretty high, and maybe steals the show? Shamanistic hippy punk woman mud wrestling with her male idols of modern art: "We are all the children of Jackson Pollock," a "licensed killer," a monster like his brothers, de Kooning, Gorky, and Rothko she chants and wails like only Patti can. After the gonzo art world intro, though, LMD's poems feel more solitary, humbler, existential, fewer allusions to artistic idols and much less world historical art and poetry combat. The most lasting for me was her reaction to hearing Burning Spear for the first time, 10, Dec, '77: "I feel my lanky sides/Misery. The mores of my race mystery-bitterness Foreign. Percussion almost alive. I will never recover from it."
I also thought I knew a lot of the catalog of ZE Records in their heyday, LMD's creative partner Esteban's NYC record label: Kid Creole, Cristina, Was (Not Was), Material, The Waitresses, Suicide, Sweet Pea Atkinson. I loved me some ZE Records in those days. But I still somehow missed Lizzy Mercier Descloux?! All the records on this 2015 collection came out originally on ZE Records but I think I jumped on board with ZE Records just about the time LMD left ZE for her 4-album solo career with Island Records in the 1980s. Her early records on this collection didn't rouse much commercial attention in the US but they did catch the ear of Island Records honcho Chris Blackwell, who sponsors her '80s albums. When, unbeknownst to me and apparently most music fans in the US, LMD turns herself into this indelible French version of Paul Simon, even beat him to making a record with musicians from South Africa in 1984 (hear her Zulu Rock) and put out a quartet of global pop albums in the '80s that were semi-popular in France but went largely unnoticed in the states. But that is getting ahead of matters here.
I even have a vague memory of ZE's 1981 Mutant Disco compilation. Tracks like "Bustin' Out" and "Out Come the Freaks" were favorites at the time but the title felt like a bit of a misconception to me. Finding Smith refer to everyone as the "mutant" spawn of Pollock has to be relevant source but at the time I expected more synths and dystopia based on the name. But what I got was more of August Darnell's hyped-up Latin-disco fantasias. Which I quite liked, mind you, but wasn't what I'd call 'mutant disco.' The concept did not completely land with me, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. In retrospect, LMD might have have helped put the concept across but she didn't have a track on that original ZE comp.
I actually didn't first hear LMD's music, or so that I can recall, until ZE's bigger 2-CD Mutant Disco comp came out in 2003. Again, many of the ZE tracks on that bigger comp I also recognized from back in the day but LMD's three songs were more or less new to me and actually did strike me as more 'mutant disco'-like than a lot of the other ZE material. I liked the way LMD played with synths and sequencers and her Leftfield French disco diva persona. Sassy and playful; dry and ironic. (Bjork comes to mind as another kindred artist.) Anyway, LMD's vibrant personality jumped out at me but I still think even then I thought of her as more of a novelty one off, like Cristina, in neither case true, but if all you knew were "Fire" or "Drive My Car" not an unreasonable conclusion either.
But rather than just a reissue of Press Color the 2015 LitAR CD is a complete collection of LMD's earliest records from 1978 and 1979, before she embarks on her 4-album solo global pop career on Island Records. She's often categorized as No Wave in this earliest musical incarnation but there's more humor and sheer musicality in LMD's records than anything you'll find on Brian Eno's No New York comp of No Wave bands from the same period.The single off Press Color is a disco novelty combining synths and sequencer tempos with LMD's French and endearingly limited English. LMD's version of Peggy Lee's "Fever," wherein she translates "Fever" as "Tumor," and spells it "Tumour" on the vinyl release, personifies LMD's goofy gothic free spirit. Goldman calls her a post-punk chanteuse.
Even her specific No Wave experiments, Tracks 10-15, the EP she produced under the moniker of Rosa Yemen in '78, crude, minimalist, and edgy as you might expect No Wave to be, still show off LMD's musicality and uncanny ability to convey so much with her largely indecipherable (by me) chirping and yelping. There's maybe a little Marlene Dietrich, a little Mary Margaret O'Hara, or some talk-singing French siren I don't know very well, Jane Birkin, in LMD's music? At any rate, she's no great singer but her singing always conveys so much charisma, and coupled with her remarkably intuitive DIY musical instincts generates an accomplished sound rare coming out of the late-'70s No Wave scene in NYC.
"Hard-Boiled Babe," recorded in 1979 with its electro chill-out vibe, and its droll, Noirish, commentary about Hollywood turning people into whores, could be a Trip Hop hit from the late '90s, think Portishead, or some deep cut off a MIA mixtape from the 2000s. Recorded in '79 it sounds remarkably accomplished and futuristic. I have to assume the 'whoring' subject matter blinded Esteban to the original's hit potential but "Hard-Boiled Babe"is LMD's most fully-realized and poignant song in English from this period. And coming full circle feels like a '79 model to Vivian Goldman's '81 post-punk cult classic, "Launderette."
Broken up again into its constituent parts I can see how LMD's early '78 and '79 records might have misfired in the US. The French, of course. The silly humor might have rubbed some angry punk artists the wrong way. Her affect, on record anyway, isn't nihilistic. It's tough and game for adventure but not submissive or revengeful. Her disco forays are charming but not full on bangers. There is always a sense with these early records that LMD is trying stuff on, experimenting, like an artist. Maybe that put off the "authenticity" crowd at CBGB's? 'She didn't sound angry or manly enough? But pull all her '78 and '79 records together, as the LitAR Press Color reissue collection does, and what I hear is a super talented stylist and one of the most musical and accomplished documents of the late '70s NYC post-punk No Wave movement I've come across.
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