Feature of the month. November 2001: POESIE NOIRE "Love is colder than death" was the album that made me buy a guitar. The year was 1989 and I had been into electronic music all my life. Poesie Noire was a purely electronic band up until this very album and when they suddenly changed their style it made me realise a couple of things about music. Such as -there are no boundaries of making music...it´s not really the instruments that sets the mood but the songwriting....and you don´t have to sing very well to express what you feel. So I did not only buy an electric guitar, I started to sing as well. After a while (through various sources such as media and friends) I understood that my potential would have to be in the songwriting.... Jo Casters -the man behind Poesie Noire- was never a singer. But it didn´t matter that much. His bands music spoke to me. After a couple of electronic albums -"Tales of Doom" and "Tetra" of which I really liked the latter - he put Poesie Noire on the map with the beautiful, melancholic, cleanly produced "Love is colder than death". If you´ve never heard this band I´d really suggest you to start by bying this album. After this PN, probably inspired by the british wave of Stone Roses and Soup Dragons but still pretty electric, made another album -"Marianne". I am not sure about this but I´ll tell you something; Jo Casters once mentioned he was somewhat disappointed with the sales of "Marianne", he said that it had only sold around 300 copies in Sweden. Well, this album was a super-hit in my hometown of Tranås. Me and some friends that love PN told our local recordstores to order loads of copies. And they did. And they sold probably like 50 copies of it. Local bands started to cover tracks of the album. Everyone that was into music in Tranås back then knew of songs like the title track, "Toulouse" and "I´ve lost a friend". After a while I realised that this was probably a unique situation. A belgian alternative band, not known to so many people, was the talk of the town -probably one of the most popular bands 1990/91- in a small city in Sweden. For us in The April Tears Poesie Noire was the first band that introduced how to crossover styles in music but to keep the same feel. Of course the impact of Primal Screams "Screamadelica" (91)introduced something that would change everything. But for me and a bunch more Poesie Noire opened up a door we didn´t know about a couple of years earlier. I remember that the english paper NME used to have people writing down "the 10 records that changed my life". "Love is colder than death" would certainly be one of them for me. /Andreas 9 other records that changed my life Back