Daran - Grand Hotel Apocalypse [CD]

Grand Hôtel Apocalypse (which follows Endorphine, released in 2017) is an album of eleven songs composed and recorded alone in his studio over a fairly short period, with the exception of the drums which were played and recorded in Los Angeles by Norm Block (The Afghan Whigs, Warpaint,..), a Californian rock drummer he met there. Grand Hôtel Apocalypse is a sort of return to basics in the form of a "power trio" (a guitar, a bass, a drum kit) with the initial motto: "No pedal"! The instruments directly into the amps, without any artifice, without any overdub. On this album, he moves away from his usual very "societal" field of expression which most of the time tries to dissect what is wrong with what surrounds us to instead focus on what is wrong with him. Everything is very personal. Even the most fictional texts contain a large part of autobiography. It is his long-time accomplice, Pierre-Yves Lebert, who put all his writing talent at the service of these little pieces of life so close to him. Helped in his task by the radical options chosen during the recording, he also mixed this album with the idea of creating a hard-hitting and incisive object in the greatest possible unity of sound. Ultimately, Grand Hôtel Apocalypse is an album that will be easy to bring on stage because it was conceived from the start as a recorded concert, right down to the order in which the songs unfold.