Lost In Tyme Blog

The Further Adventures of Vietnam Veterans as the Gitanes - 2009 - Strange Girl

The Gitanes are :
Mark Enbatta : vocals, guitars
Lucas Trouble : bass, keyboards, vocals
James Kibut : guitars
Eric Lenoir : drums

If you are a regular visitor of Lost-In-Tyme you'll know our love for this great band.
New album from probably the best psychedelic band of the 80's ! The Vietnam Veterans are back with 17 great songs.
Here is a sort introduction to new Vets album Strange Girl !

We ask Mark Enbatta to tell us few words about the new songs...
and here is what he said :

"Very happy you like Strange Girl. I'm crazy about this record !
No problem to write a few words about every song !"

• Fishing Song
Lucas wrote the music. Usually it's very hard to write lyrics for his songs! He's a very talented musician and producer but he's a complicated writer! The words are about our Dutch wild fishing sessions with Hans Kesteloo and Jan Van der Bent. We started fishing "walleyes (Zander) together in the 80's and meet every last Saturday of May. We fish, get stoned, talk and sleep on the banks of a lake. It's a real psychedelic experience!

• Girl with the Hairy Legs

It was one of my acoustic song about a drummer I was playing with in the late 60's. It was a time of free love and sex! I was spending my summertime in a shack on top of a cliff in the Basque country. I was living there with my (much older than me) girlfriend and a friend. A lot of freaks would come and visit us for acid trips. Among them was a girl who believed in Indian culture. She had what Lucas and I call "deer legs": not as thin as a deer's but hairy as a deer! My drummer was in love with this girl but she prefered my bassist... The funny thing was that we were often 20 in the same bedroom but my drummer never made love with the girl with the hairy legs...Many years later I met the guy and he was now a very rich guy collecting gold watches, Leica cameras, Mercedes Benz cars, vintage guitars and amps. I saw this guy wasn't happy in his life and I wrote this song. I hope he will never know it's about him...

• Till You Fall
Typical Bo Diddley beat with cajun psychedelia in it! It's a song we were playing during the last tour... Just a dance song!

• Fall In Love Again
The kind of slow song I always loved by Otis Redding, Them or the Animals. James is doing a great job on this one! The lyrics are true... I don't want to fall in love again ...but I think I couldn't help it!

• Female Vampire’s Fuzzy Beaver
Here is the Strange Girl ! A song by Lucas and it's a tradition for me to write words about pubic hair on his music! It started in 86 with Safety razors! Stupid funny words on a brilliant 60's influenced work. This girl's vampire teeth are not in her mouth...

• Malakas Yeah Yeah
This one is about modern communication. I know a lot of people through my computer... In the past I was meeting people on the road... The title was given to me by Lost in Tyme magazine! He told me the square Greek people called your 60's freaks Malakas ye ye! The music is typical Black Floyd or Pink Sabbath !

• Burn in Hell
A classical Vietnam Veterans angry song! It's built around what Lucas calls "my one and only riff"! There's a DDBM&T "shoulder job" rhythm in it. Watch old 60's live videos and you'll understand !

• Mercy
A song about guilt... The way we played it is far from the mood I wanted but that's the way the guys felt the song. Twanging... A surprise for me as I thought it would be the most psychedelic song on the album !

• I Don’t Deserve You
The Byrds meet a stoned Tex Avery! James played it like Clarence White from the very first rehearsal although he never heard Clarence White before! I'm playing 12 string Rickenbacker and TB Noze (the Buckaroos) is HUGE on mandolin. Early Flamin' Groovies feel! Country not KKKountry...

• No Way Back
A song about acid tests... I stole the opening riff from a cartoon my young daughters watch on TV! The freak out part is a real one. It's the first time we can do it in a studio !

• Another Life
James wrote this beautiful song! The lyrics are about a girl I met. We both knew we could start a strong love story together but already had complicated lives... So we just meet and say hello how are your kids?
Maybe in another life...

• I'm Alive
My life is rather hard... It's always a surprise for me to start something new when I feel so desperate...

• Danger
Eric wrote the music. I don't even play on this one because Lucas and James are PERFECT! My lyrics are really DARK and sincere ... My daughter Cynthia (I gave her my life...) is busy on a video clip for this great song...

• Breams of Today
The title is a joke about Dreams of today! Dreams of today was a song of hope, this one is a song of dispair... Next time I'll write Creams of today! The bream is the stinking fish you don't want to catch! My broken voice is so true to match the words. I hate to sing such words but it's my cruel truth... Lucas wrote a great "Seedy" music. As always it's a very complicated song !

• I Remember the Time
Lucas and only Lucas! He even sings for the first time... I didn't want to sing those nasty words! I just sing some backing vocals... Great dirty song! I like to sing VERY dirty songs but I want to write the words myself !

• Tartan Miniskirt
Great Rhythm n Blues music by Lucas! Words about my mod days in the 60's. The French mods were very special, very different from the English ones! I thought about the people in Larissa when I wrote the lyrics !

• Thirteen/When I Was Young
A live in the studio session by stoned and drunk people! I knew the Dantzig song by Johnny Cash and the very last words are "when I was young"... so we started one of my all time favorite songs at the end of Thirteen! We didn't keep the original vocals because there was noise on the track. The rest is really live !

"I think MP3 is a very bad standard and I don't download.
Anyway I think that fans who can afford the records BUY the records !"
~Mark Enbatta

Overview :
The return of The Vietnam Veterans is a fact !
Even now, in the year 2009, most psychedelic acidheads still remember the legendary cult band from Chalon Sur Saone, France : The Vietnam Veterans and their stunning, hypnotizing music. Their last album (as Vietnam Veterans) was released in 1987 and now, 21 years later, they return with a mesmerizing new masterpiece!

Nobody, not even The Vietnam Veterans, expected this to happen.
Mark Enbatta and Lucas Trouble remained close friends through the years, with Trouble busy recording wild music in his now-legendary Kaiser Studios. They hooked up with James Kiput and Eric Lenoir, played some try-outs in Greece and the karma was back. The Vietnam Veterans sound wasn't gone. It was even present more than ever. The four lunatics went into the studio and here you can judge the result ! A brand-new album full with 72 minutes hypnotic psychedelic music: The true Vietnam Veterans sound.

Beware ! Adults only.

Bucketful Of Brains once wrote about 'Green Peas' : 'Souls must have been sold for a performance like this'.

This is the best album ever to come out of France !!!

You can find "The Vietnam Veterans" on MySpace :
www.myspace.com/thevietnamveterans

And you can buy the new Vietnam Veterans album from here :
http://www.rimpo.de/mmlist.htm