Mr. Oizo - Moustache (Half A Scissor)

Ever done one of those optic puzzles where you have to cross your eyes and stare for a while before you see the hidden image? Know how frustrating they are at first, and how you start to get that headache? But then you persevere and keep staring until finally you exclaim in delight “Oh dude! It’s a unicorn!” That is the metaphor I will invoke to illustrate how one should approach this record: At times it can be very trying, and at other times you’ll think your CD is skipping, but be patient and trust yourself to Quentin Dupieux’s distortions. And you’ll find the groove. Just like the unicorn. Opening with what sounds like a polite salutation (“Hello to everyone; this is popular music.”), Dupieux dives right into his postmodern eccentricity, with seemingly randomly placed blips and piano samples. It doesn’t take long to get to what he dubs as ‘dirty house’ with the filtered bass loops on “Latex.” Track “Nurse Bob” reminds me of fighting Bowser on my NES (except I haven’t slept in 96 hours and am running on nothing but caffeine and cheese puffs). “Drop Urge Need Elle” is a fantastic track, sampling what sounds like Dupieux channel surfing, tied together with an urgent synth loop. The album doesn’t hit its peak, however, until the grinding, bass heavy title track “Half a scissor.” As the disc nears its edge, watch out for the brief nod to the Beastie Boys. Throughout the 40 minutes, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any structure, any beginning or end (in fact, if you leave it on repeat, you’ll be clueless as to when you started over). Take first single “Stunt,” for example. While it is probably the least scattered cut of the seventeen, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it radio friendly. Your best bet is to treat this as an ‘album’ and not as a collection of club singles. Besides, some tracks, like “(e),” only serve as a bridge from movement to movement. If you were a part of the whole “Flat Beat” rage, I can’t promise you’ll love “Moustache.” There are no accessible gimmicks here, and no weird head-banging puppet. This is not comfortable house music, with a constant looped beat and predictable layers. Mr. Oizo’s sound exists on the fringes of that genre (generally reserved for the mad scientist type). Just don’t dismiss it as ‘pretentious noise’ either: Its charm is in its unshaven absurdity. That, and when Dupieux thinks of some ingenious way to achieve commercial success a la Flat Eric, at least you can say, “Yeah, well I was into him way before you were!” [www.mroizostunt.com]