Milky Ways

You may know Joakim Bouaziz from his 2007 album Monsters and Silly Songs, a sui generis fusion of disco, post-punk and pop that became something of an instant cult classic. You may know him for his remixes of artists like Cut Copy, Simian Mobile Disco, Annie, Alter Ego, Poni Hoax, and more. You may know him from his years behind the scenes at Tigersushi, the iconic Parisian label at the crossroads between post-punk, dance music and the avant-garde. But whatever you think you know about Joakim, prepare to be very surprised by this: Milky Ways, his third studio album.

The opening "Back to Wilderness" is eight minutes of sturm-und-klang dirge that's more Black Sabbath than Black Devil, more Sonic Youth than Sleeping Bag. And that's just the intro. Over the course of a tidy 51 minutes, Joakim and his band mates fold together bits of psychedelia, old-school computer music, exotica, electro-pop, blues, new wave, New Pop, Krautrock and more into an expansive, remarkably coherent album that refuses to be reduced to a single genre, much less a single idea. This is no pastiche: these are proper songs, and the whole album follows the kind of overall arc that's rare in a contemporary long-player.