Faucheuse are a bit like your usual favourite meal but with a different sauce and seasoning. And while you wouldn’t think this favourite meal of yours - one you’ve been eating exactly the same way for years - could be cooked differently and still taste brilliant, it does, in a spectacular fashion.

Faucheuse are from Bordeaux (France’s national d-beat sanctuary) and play an incredible original blend of classic, fist-pumping, riff-driven Totalitär-style käng hardcore done to perfection and epic head-banging hard rock’n’roll. Not the boring “d-beat’n’roll” bollocks, the tasty stuff.

The songwriting is ace and clearly thought-out. All the elements, from the thundering guitar leads and solos (with an almost heavy-metal quality at times), the groovy bass variations, the presence of “unorthodox” instruments, the clever use of pauses, the songs’ structures to the vocals’ changes of tines, contribute to the genuine narrative quality of the songs. It’s not arty or anything, it’s still raw d-beat hardcore but more subtle than your common Dis. It’s got style and it rocks hard.
Emilie sings her heart out and deals in tunes instead of screams, unusual for the genre indeed. It takes a moment to get used to it but it makes the music even more energetic, dynamic (those mid-paced songs…), and catchy. I am hearing vintage heavy-metal and classic French punk-rock in the singing style but to be honest it sounds pretty unique.

Who said d-beat hardcore was bound to be unoriginal? This Lp contains five brand new songs on one side and the ones from the demo tape on the other. Let’s welcome Faucheuse, the Paintbox of käng hardcore.

Our take: We carried an earlier cassette from this French hardcore band and while I really liked it, Faucheuse has created something special with their debut vinyl. You could describe it simply as käng hardcore with melodic vocals, but that would imply Faucheuse is a one-trick pony, which is definitely not the case. Maybe a better way to describe Rêve Électrique is hardcore punk that’s not afraid of melody, and there’s definitely something that warrants a Paintbox reference in the way Faucheuse opens up hardcore’s traditionally narrow boundaries. And as with Paintbox, you really don’t know what the next track is going to bring. I love the brief electronic interludes, for instance, but the songs are adventurous on their own, the band often nimbly changing up grooves in ways that make these songs develop in surprising ways. I worry I’m describing this as pretentious, but really it’s just hardcore punk that’s not boxed in by the rules of any microgenre, happy to pull from the best aspects of several of them. The label’s description sums it perfectly: “who said d-beat hardcore was bound to be unoriginal?”