Zombie Zombie - A Land For Renegades

by Tom Mendelsohn

Braaaaaaaaains

"The music is moody and intense, pulsing with tangible menace and dynamism"

The musical collaboration baby of a French free jazz saxophonist and sound engineer and an anti-folk musician calling himself Cosmic Neman does not, in prospect, sound like it should be something worth a lot of anyone’s time. In fact, it sounds positively and gratuitously unlistenable, so it is with relief and pleasure that we can report that Zombie Zombie is nothing of the sort.

Always be suspicious of albums scoring imaginary films. Always be suspicious of side projects, especially those from musicians of already minor bands (Neman, you see, is out of Herman Dune). Especially always be suspicious of anything with a self-proclaimed jazz influence. Wise words all – the end results of such confluence are normally smug, ugly and longwinded.

Pleasantly, though, for all concerned – not least your reviewer – this side project, a jazz-influenced score for an imaginary film, is highly enjoyable. The music is moody and intense, pulsing with tangible menace and dynamism, and there is barely a sense of anyone getting too big for their boots.

‘A Land For Renegades’ is, when you get down to it, proggish Krautrock. Superior proggish Krautrock, but still not music for parties or family gatherings. In the minds of its creators, the album is meant to soundtrack a film featuring fugitives, wolves, and meeting the ghosts of David Bowie and Iggy Pop in a club. This is probably as good a description as any to encapsulate how the music sounds…

It ends up not dissimilar to the Thomas Bangalter soundtrack for Irreversible in tone and atmosphere, although it is far less forceful, and it presumably has fewer anal rape scenes to accompany. As you can imagine, the whole project is very Gallic indeed, which is very much to its credit.

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