Rinôçérôse: Music Kills Me

Forever damned to critical purgatory, French house is generally best when it's entertaining its worst tendencies. Patterned on gaudy pleasures and wink-wink airs, the genre basically wills itself away when in top form, stitching disco and soul clichés into an ensemble that covers up its mannequin-like essence. It says something about a style when its reigning masterpiece, Daft Punk's Discovery, rattles the foundations only by reaching cartoonishly over the top. But then, the alternative is an album like Rinôçérôse's Music Kills Me, which gets lost somewhere between camp and institutionalism. Rinôçérôse made its name on 1999's Installation Sonore as a dance act that builds its tracks around guitars, and the best songs on Music Kills Me play fast and loose with that reputation. "Le Rock Summer (Edit)" opens with a tangle of metal crunch and rich, ringing rhythm guitar, then rolls into a disco send-up that navigates the spaces separating Poison, New Order, and Chic. The title track slaps a gravelly Texas-blues vocal sample on top of fist-pumping chords seemingly lifted straight from Mötley Crüe. It's hard to say what makes such gloriously stupid fusions work, but the answer reveals itself as the album progressively drains off its energy. By the third track, Music Kills Me limps into the well-worn territory of generic deep-house, with flutes and wah-wah effects playing like painfully obvious in-jokes. Tracks like "Lost Love" reach uncommonly tuneful heights, but unlike Daft Punk, which invests its decadent excess with deceptively heartfelt sadness, Rinôçérôse mostly fails to step out of a bland middle ground reserved for a Chardonnay-sipping life of leisure.