Fly Pan Am is not your average post-rock band. Unlike your Tortoises and your Uis and your Mice Parades, the word 'smooth' could never be used to describe what Fly Pan Am does. Their music is loud, messy and chaotic, and they come a lot closer to 80s no-wave than they do to jazz fusion. The musicians may or may not be improvising, but if they are, it's not out of any respect for a tradition; it's because the songs sound a little crazier and more fucked up that way.

Ceux Qui Inventent N'ont Jamais Vecu (?) (loosely translated: "those who invent have never lived") finds the band turning up the funk and tuning in to the cosmic vibration of Can's Tago Mago. There's no doubt about it, bassist Jean-Sébastian Truchy worships at the alter of Holger Czukay, and almost every track here is anchored by a percussive bassline that hits like a leather boot to the solar plexus. Moving through and around the groove is a whole mess of shaggy, atonal guitar that could come from a U.S. Maple record, all of it stitched together with Fly Pan Am's ever-present tape splicing. At a few points on the record, the track cuts off completely, only to emerge a split-second later a few beats off. Smooth, this ain't.

The rhythmic punch is something to behold throughout the album, but once you get used to that, things get a bit iffy. Too many tracks seem like little more than an excuse for the bassist and drummer to lock into a love embrace, with no accompanying thematic or melodic development. It would be nice to see more tracks like "Univoque/Equiovoque," which has a customarily funky beat but adds an interesting music-box instrumental contrast and ringing guitars that border on the beautiful. By contrast, cuts like the slapbass workout "Rompre L'Indifference de L'Inexitable Avant Que L'on vienne Rompre Le Sommeil de 'Inanimie'" just kind of hang there. In between these poles are "Sound Support Surface Noises Reaching Out to You," which combines nervous, jittery funk with Oval-style digital post-production, and "Erreur; Errance; Interdits de Par Leurs Novelles Possibilites," a richly textured sound collage with an assortment of odd organic noises.

Ceux Qui Inventent N'ont Jamais Vecu (?) has an attractive air of unpredictability: it seems as though each track could go just about anywhere at any given moment. A track called "Partially Sabotaged Distraction" consistently crashes my computer whenever it comes on, and I can't help but wonder if the effect is intentional. But for all the loose experimentation afoot, this is an easy album to ignore. Fly Pan Am are not your average post-rock band, but they're not a particularly great one, either.

-Mark Richard-San, June 7th, 2002