Paris Suit Yourself / My Main Shitstain

Paris Suit Yourself
My Main Shitstain
(Big Dada)

Imagine if you will, that you wake up one morning and, instead of being in your bed wrapped up and warm, you’re on the wet floor of a foreign warehouse, and you stink of fish. You look at your arms: they are lobster arms. Then you look around you: there are fellow lobsters scuttling along by your side. Then a mad Frenchman in an apron walks in and starts barking orders at you. Before you know it, you’ve been paired up with another lobster and the mad Frenchman is commanding you to fight each other to the fishy end.
No I haven’t been at the acid again, this is merely the surreal scene depicted by a song called ‘Brainwashed’ on the debut album by Paris Suit Yourself. It’s one of several mental scenes too: ‘Surprise’ sounds like a small cute animal, perhaps a Gizmo, being vocally taunted by an evil wretched goblin, perhaps a Gremlin. Another song ‘Lost My Girl’ sounds like a drunken man celebrating the fact that he’s sold his soul. “I lost my soul... Ooo YEAH!” he shouts. “Hit me! Hit me!” he hollers, perhaps oblivious to the fact that he’ll inevitably wake up in the morning and see a rather horrifying receipt.
Elsewhere, ‘Solliloque’ pits a coolly detached female vocal (of “Not coming back”) to the desperate snot bubbles of her former lover (who cries “Oh please come back!” to yet another cool reply of “Not coming back.”) Meanwhile, a deep throated French narrator exhales cigarette smoke over the microphone, like the Devil casually observing his most recent purchase: one man’s soul.
Perhaps it’s time we did some explaining. Paris Suit Yourself are a French trio who’ve recently been chosen by Mark E. Smith to team up with The Fall on tour. Their debut album is brave, perverted and utterly compelling - it’s also so strange however, that by Paul Artrocker’s own admission, he had to pluck up the courage over a number of weeks before he had the balls to broadcast the damn thing on our radio show.
Listening to the record is like looking in on a scene you really shouldn’t have access to; suicidal contemplation, masochistic orgasms, bad fruit and weird nightmares. There’s only so far we can go with words before you’ll be faced with a dilemma all of your own: dare you invite ‘My Main Shitstain’ onto your stereo?