Troublemakers are a French electronic music trio from Marseille, who formed in 1998, were quickly signed, and soon released their debut album Doubts & Convictions. The three had initially formed their friendship out of a shared love for, amongst other things, film music scores. It does make sense then that they have made it somewhat of a goal of theirs to compose their music, not for the purposes of making something that is explicitly fun to dance to (like the emerging French house scene), but with the intent of crafting a firm, detailed atmosphere. Their music is usually at the mid-tempo range and infatuated with the melding of funk, jazz, jungle, hip-hop, electro, and a multitude of other sounds and musical traditions.

As I’ve made clear in some of my other reviews on purely instrumental – or almost purely instrumental – tracks, such as “Raw Cuts #3”, “Don’t You Want to Be in a Cult”, and “Moonlight Serenade”, I still need a lot of figuring out to do as far as how writing about lyricless music actually works. So, instead of embarrassing myself this time, I’ll just make this one short. The melding of the soft jazz bits with electronic influences (with the former far overshadowing the latter) really succeeds at giving off the impression that this is some kind of retro film score. There is a bluesy singer that comes in, but not until about halfway through. When she does, though, the song is ever so gently elevated into something a bit more ethereal than I ever thought the song had the potential to be. Nonetheless, though, it stays pretty steady in flow and intensity from beginning to end, and while the sound is nice, I think I would have liked a little something more interesting done with the production to really push this one over the edge. Nonetheless, Troublemakers have left quite a good impression on me.