Dampa: ‘Crises’ review

What I Know:
Dampa are French ‘Electronic Soul Duo’ Victor Maître and Angéline Savelli. If you’re a big fan of your perfumes you may recognise their debut single, Thunderball from an Yves Saint Laurent advert for the Black Opium Pure Illusion fragrance (of course I knew that without doing any research!)

Otherwise, you probably haven’t heard of them as Crises is only their second record thus far.

What I Like:
Some perfumes are acquired tastes.

I used to wear Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male until several people commented on it; recognising the scent and then telling me their ex-boyfriend / son / Dad / blah blah blah wears it. It ruined it for me, to tell you the truth. I started to see said aftershave as a populist choice and said comments as a ringing endorsement of what a thoroughly bloody pleasant aftershave it is.

I don’t like pleasant. I like acquired tastes. I like something a bit pungent; that isn’t instantly likeable but that you grow to love after repeatedly being subjected to it against your will. Like Stockholm Syndrome. Or a finger up the bottom.

If Crises was a perfume it’d have a lot of really dark, exotic notes in there like Oud alongside some actually pretty sweet bits like vanilla and honey. But it’d also have some pretty mad stuff like ambergris (which is whale sick to you and I).

It’d be bloody powerful – enough to give a few people a bit of a headache after a few minutes no doubt – but I feel pretty sure you’d succumb to it’s charms in the end.

Speaking of charming things, I feel like I make a Kanye reference every week at the moment and for that I truly apologise but with the opening bassy notes, there’s definitely real echoes of his I Am A God in here; something that’s only accentuated by Savelli’s rapped delivery and the percussive stabs between lines.

But the track does lighten up towards the middle where there’s even enough space at one point to welcome a choir of angels before the nightclub throb bursts back in.

Some tracks are acquired tastes; and this is definitely one of them. But it comes up smelling of roses by the close.

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