Search - Chocolat :: Chocolat (Dig)

"Imagine Bob Dylan fronting The Yardbirds in 1964 at the Crawdaddy Club." -- Mojo "They pull from a rainbow array of influences that all fall under the harder, rockier categories, and apply the sound to a 21st-century-accessible form." -- BiBaBiDi "Like Roy Orbison leading the Black Lips, Chocolat live up to their addictive namesake." -- Chart Attack "With its stoned grooves, infectious tunefulness, and solid musical variety, Chocolat's EP offers a consistently engaging listen." -- Exclaim "Everyone, and I mean everyone, is talkin' about the sweet Franco soul pop of Chocolat." -- The Hour As the feral child of the Montreal indie music scene, Chocolat forgoes pretension for passion. Their dirty, retro, futuristic ass-shaking mix of psychedelic garage and bluesy folk-rock is the soundtrack for the misadventures of modern day miscreants everywhere. Singer and former one-man-band Jimmy Hunt's Dylanesque crooning glides over frenzied riffs, serpentine bass lines, greasy organs, and pounding drums spit out by a pedigree of rock stripes fought and earned for by members of Demon's Claws (In The Red), CPC Gangbangs (Swami Records), and The Cockroaches (Solid Sex Lovie Doll). Chocolat's genre-crunching debut EP is partly indebted to early Kinks, Brian Jones-era Stones, The Yardbirds, The Seeds, The Pretty Things, and Johnny Cash as well as the Velvet Underground with a twist of Jacques Dutronc. Plowing through a French yéyé revisionist history of American garage and English freakbeat, their relentless energy nonetheless defies language with their catchy tunes and makes it futile to label them "French pop." The seven songs deal with familiar rock `n' roll literary topics like sleeping with your best friend's girl, closet transvestites, drinking off your girlfriend's pay check, Johnny Depp, groupies, being broke, and of course, watching the one you love grow fat. The band's refined psycho-sexual boogie, modern psychedelia, classic soul-pop songwriting, and the raw power of their live sets hasn't gone unrecognized as they've played across Canada and in the US alongside the likes of Jay Reatard, The Black Lips, King Khan, Times New Viking, and The Besnard Lakes. The EP is now finally released in the US and Europe, and foreshadows their upcoming full length due in September 2009. Everyone agrees, Chocolat is better than sex!