close

Frànçois and the Atlas Mountains follow UK festival slots with autumn 2012 UK/ Ireland tour

Posted: 11 years ago
Headline shows promise excerpts from E Volo Love and new material, tickets on sale now

Very, very quietly currently building a small but partisan fan-base is one young man from La Rochelle in France and his musical stooges, aka Fránçois and the Atlas Mountains. With a name like theirs, you'd be forgiven for thinking "classic heavy rock-music", but nothing could be further from the truth. Fránçois Marry, the band's diverse-thinking, thoughtful front-man and creative pivot, released something of a slow-burning catalogue up until last year when he signed to leading indie Domino. Records

Hip hipsters in the know will already have copies of the band's tape (TAPE?) "Sleeping States", the hand-made CD-R (CD_R??) "Les Anciennes Falaises" and ultra-rare 12" "The People to Forget", formats that suggest Marry to be something of a musical luddite - not so. In fact, there are also the usual downloads and CDs of his bright breezy cosmopolitan future-pop available, much of which evokes British Sea Power, Stereolab, The Wake and, well, anything but classic heavy-rock.

After joining Domino's roster last year, Marry set about releasing the most recent album "E Volo Love", a hazy platter of dreamy French pop and British electronica (with a pinch of the Mediterranean here and there) that wouldn't sound out of place in a sports-car convertible, top-down, whizzing through the Italian mountains (or even the Atlas mountains).

Thankfully, you won't have that far to go to catch Fránçois and crew - they're heading to the UK and Ireland for an October tour, starting in Brighton on the 22nd and followed by shows in Ashford (Kent), Reading, Shoreditch and many more until Belfast at the Ulster Bank Festival on the 29th. The band will then head down to Dublin for a show on the 30th. Tickets are available now, priced under a tenner.

Don't forget that you can also catch them at the imminent Summer Sundae and End of the Road festivals later in the summer!

Paul Pledger