Jazz Lambaux - Unplugged Music For April Fools Day

Recently, I stumbled across Nirvana’s 1993 unplugged version of “About A Girl” - hearing it for the first time in almost 20 years - then, out of curiosity, I checked the original song that the band released on their debut album, Bleach, in 1989. Safe for the audience loudly cheering, I could swear that the MTV version was in fact the original “About a Girl” recording and the album one a psyched up take on that acoustic original - no matter what the chronology told me. With Unplugged Music for April Fool’s Day, Jazz Lambaux plays a somehow similar trick on us: by giving to hear now what seem like the definitive original versions of songs he has been distilling for the past 4 years - and that eventually ended up sitting all together on the programmatic Music for Fools (2022-2024) (released almost exactly one year ago) - he re-enacts that Nirvana time paradox. 2026, 2022, 2025… a chronological mayhem that sounds like some Christopher Nolan’s hocus-pocus. My mentioning of Nolan here is purely accidental though, as there’s very little reason to force a comparison between the British American film maker and the French jester/musician. The America portrayed by Jazz Lambaux and his team on Unplugged Music for April Fool’s Day is quite the opposite of that in Nolan’s films: it’s unheroic and trashy, but also fun, uncompromising and sexy in its own bizarre way.

While the original Music for Fools (2022-2024 opened (or smashed) a window onto a white American middle-class driving around suburbia in $40,000 Lexus and Toyotas (bought on credit), the unplugged version, takes us to the dive bars and pubs of yet-to-be-gentrified downtowns and city centers. The kind of places where McNulty and Bunk get gently hammered in The Wire: slightly stuffy, heart-warming wood-paneled pubs that reek of bud lights, bourbon and Newports. An all-so-perfect setting for Enora Morice’s smallpipes and the voices of Jazz, Lucie and 300SkullsAndCounting amplified by agitprop-style megaphones to disclose the folk & blues roots of the songs (and of 99% of pop music in general) that make up what retrospectively feels like an amphetamine-boosted debut LP, in comparison with this acoustic version. Softer, quieter interpretations that certainly won’t prevent some teeth from gnashing: crammed with acid comments and (occasionally scatological) dubious jokes, this mock live performance ties together SNL virtuoso music skits & HBO prestige Y2K series, the Farelli brothers (“The Turtle Joke” echoes Dumb And Dumber 2’s opening scene) and William S. Burroughs (“The Star Spangled Banner Joke”, obviously). Unplugged Music for April Fool’s Day, with its mix of straight-from-the-heart pop rock ballads and deranged moments, does not exactly bring the histrionic French musician to the family table, but somewhere closer. PG-13 (M/M - wholesale: shops, contact us)