Gilles Snowcat 2025
Don’t Leave Your Mistakes Unattended
Going cinematic, Brussels hedonist adds bursts of color to his film-noir narrative.
The world has moved on and took a turn for the worse in the five years that passed since this musician offered himself up for unboxing, and Gilles Snowcat wasn’t riveted to a single spot for the half-decade either: releasing a few singles in the interim, the Belgian artist has been rather busy, but something’s changed in him too. While Gilles’s earlier works seemed filled with humor, which marked each home-away-from-home territory his pastiche tent appeared to be pitched in, artful seriousness started creeping into Snowcat’s performances, and “Don’t Leave Your Mistakes Unattended” might become a pinnacle of such a process. Not a concept album per se, its pieces are driven by a script where the story never gets in the way of an arresting, images-evoking tune and where the writer’s voice and ivories render his ensemble’s arrangements as exotically spiked Eurocentric sketches.
Not for nothing the record’s initial setting is the composer’s own country, despite the Caribbean vibe that “Something New In Waterloo” imports from his previous platter only to wrap reggae in Patrick Deltenre’s melancholic harmonica and muscular guitar, and allow Gilles to raspily whisper sweet melodious observations into the listener’s ear, not unlike Serge Gainsbourg used to do. Yet if “Monaco 1972” embraces a similar groove, its dynamic scope and stylistic reach are much wider, with Duke Quarcoo’s mighty bass and Vincent Penasse’s sleazy sax amplifying the ballad’s sexy jive, before Snowcat’s own forlorn piano chords get dissolved into silence, whence the gorgeous "Tiny Little Ice Cubes" and ruminative “Pandan Smash Amaretto” emerge, blending his vocals with those of, respectively. Adriana Dath and Ana Cozman. These two sybarite-minded numbers come separated by the fantastically funky instrumental “(Theme From) Shopping Street – The Pyjama Scene” which could embroider a ’70s movie and should be licensed for a nostalgic comedy as soon as possible, as should “At The Marzipan Bar” which surprisingly introduces the exquisite acoustic blues to the album’s elegiac flow.
However, whereas the wordless “Almond Squash (The Marzipan Theme)” plunges lounge jazz into seductive electronica and barebone rhythmic patterns, “Coast Avenue Drive (Taking Action In Haute Couture)” offers an expansive cosmic landscape to form an epic-scale prog-fusion finale. A delightful adventure, indeed.
****2/3
