the liminanas Archives - Vinyl From The Vault

The Limiñanas “Faded”

sfilzen — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 19:14:32 +0000

The Limiñanas “Faded” 2025. Limited edition red vinyl, Berreto Music/Because Music Records. Sultry psychedelic garage rock from France, chock full of collaborations including two tracks with Jon Spencer. I must have been one of the very first people to preorder it as I also received a limited to 100 7″ single. Faded is something like their 10th release since their 2010 debut. The Limiñanas remain soooo cool and their latest LP does not disappoint: it’s slinky and shimmery plus the multitude of musicians brings an excellent variety to the album. Of course my top tracks are the two Spencer songs: the laser-tinged “Space Baby” (classic Spencer yelps, growls, “Yeahs!” and silliness: “I’m floating in that tin can…”) and “Degenerate Star.” I’m also a big fan of “Prisoner of Beauty” featuring Bobby Gillespie (The Jesus & Mary Chain, Primal Scream) and the jangly Bowie-esque “Shout” featuring Rove (aka Timothée Régnier). And while my rudimentary high school level French doesn’t help much with parsing the lyrics, I also really love the French-lyric’d collaborations: “J’adore le Monde” with French singer/composer Bertrand Belin and the sexy, whispery “Catherine” sung by French singer Anna Jean (whom Discogs tells me is daughter of Nobel-prize awarded author J.M.G. Le Clezio). The Limiñanas-only tracks are pretty damn good too, especially their rendition of the classic r&b song by Richard Berry, then garage rock song popularized by the Kingsmen “Louie Louie” (and apparently the world’s most recorded rock song) that The Limiñanas somehow made luxuriously seductive – singing it in French helped – as well as the hypnotically buzzy “Autour de Chez Moi” which features both Lionel and Marie Limiñana on back-and-forth conversational vocals (though I have no clue what they’re chatting about).

The post The Limiñanas “Faded” appeared first on Vinyl From The Vault.

Pascal Comelade and Les Limiñanas “The Nothing Twist”

sfilzen — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 18:09:46 +0000

Pascal Comelade and Les Limiñanas “The Nothing Twist” 2014. Trouble In Mind Records, yellow vinyl. We’re big fans of Les Limiñanas, the très chic garage-psych French duo of Lionel and Marie Limiñana (reminiscent of the Velvet Underground) but I was unaware of Pascal Comelade, with whom they collaborated on this instrumental LP. Comelade is also French, specializing in experimental music. From Discogs: “Comelade began making strange cover songs of rock and easy listening standards with such instruments as singing saw, toy piano etc. He later developed an unconfoundable style…”The Nothing Twist has Les Limiñanas’ signature laid-back organ-forward style with a heavy garage beat and mixes in Comelade’s “unconfoundable” element with weird sliding sounds from organs, plastic guitars and other instruments that aren’t readily identifiable but kazoo is definitely one of them, also possibly theremin. Most of the tracks are written by Comelade, Les Limiñanas or both and really groovy – I especially like “Carnival of Souls” (very creepy-carnival yet still a cooler-than-cool 60′s vibe), the title track “The Nothing – Twist,” the wicked-beat and organ insanity of “T.B. Jerk,” “Wunderbar” which is super-dark and hypnotic, and “One of Us, One of Us, One of Us” which is awesomely similar to The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” There are also a couple of covers like “Why Are We Sleeping?” which was originally released in 1968 by the British psych band Soft Machine – it’s really great, in my opinion way better than the original. They also cover British pop singer Chris Andrews 1965 hit “Yesterday Man” mixing in a whisper of psych and a lot of weirdness to an oom-pah beat but otherwise bland 60′s pop song (not surprisingly, Andrews’ song was HUGE in Germany). I’m not that crazy about their cover of “Green Fuz” originally by Texas garage rockers Green Fuz in 1969 (The Cramps have also covered that track).

The post Pascal Comelade and Les Limiñanas “The Nothing Twist” appeared first on Vinyl From The Vault.

The Limiñanas “Shadow People”

sfilzen — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 20:06:03 +0000

The Limiñanas “Shadow People” 2018. Because Music records. Neo-psychedelia from France. Shadow People is the Limiñanas’ sixth LP (I think we have at least three or four of their other releases) and it retains their sound that can be briefly summarized as The Velvet Underground meets The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Black Angels. Think long droning, trippy melodies in minor, atmospheric soaring rhythms, sometimes in English, sometimes in French. “Istanbul is Sleepy” is Velvet Underground gone a bit brilliantly goth. The title track, “Shadow People” is glorious, a hazy shoe-gazey psychedelic trip. “Dimanche” – sung in rich, echoey French which my shakey adolescent French studies doesn’t quite translate (I think he says “J’adore” at one point, also “vie” so I’m thinking it’s something about loving life) – is heavy on tambourine punctuation and exotic guitar. “The Gift” sounds positively 80′s new wave (not a bad thing at all!), the guitar hook calling to mind Modern English’s “Melt With You.” “Motorizzati Marie” has a crazed spaghetti western flavor put to a fist-pounding beat and piano while “Pink Flamingos” is 60′s flower child saucer-eyed sweetness that segues into the heavy, dark “Trois Bancs.”

I like Allmusic’s overall summary of this latest Limiñanas release: Nothing too shocking, but also nothing to give lovers of their sound any pause or worries that, after releasing so many records in a short time frame, they might start phoning it in. The Limiñanas sound like they’re too cool and nonchalant to even have a phone, much less use one to make a less than great record.

The post The Limiñanas “Shadow People” appeared first on Vinyl From The Vault.