Alain Bashung
Fantaisie militaire

THE REVIEW

Many groups and artists in rock history owe their success to a sound, a way of presenting themselves to the audience, a narrative style—essentially, an artistic balance that consolidates more and more over the years, eventually leading the artist or band to endlessly replicate the same album, the same tried-and-tested formula, which tends to lead to a serene (and often anonymous) career end. However, there are artists who are accompanied by an underlying restlessness that becomes increasingly urgent over the years and albums, serving as a propellant for continuous and unpredictable changes in direction. It goes without saying that in this latter case, the risks to a career increase significantly, making it very easy to lose credibility and audience with artistically "wrong" choices. In the case of Alain Bashung, however, the opposite is true: a monument of French rock, he experienced great success in the early '80s by riding the punk wave first and then the new-wave, only to distance himself from more commercial rock, producing rather anonymous albums between the '80s and '90s, although they were more experimental and original than before.

This Fantaisie Militaire from 1998 marks a decisive turning point: together with a group of top-level musicians (including Rodolphe Burger from Kat Onoma and guitarist Adrian Utley from Portishead) and thanks to the decisive contribution of Jean Fauque's visionary and surrealist lyrics, Bashung releases an extremely accomplished album that manages to be simultaneously experimental (Samuel Hall) and traditional (La nuit je mens) with the same incisiveness, and moves with surprising freshness despite being mostly within dark and hermetic tracks. The aforementioned La nuit je mens is undoubtedly the jewel of the album, as well as the most accessible track, a magnificent portrait of an intense love and precisely for this reason restless, tormented, and constantly in motion, characteristics that often recur in the lyrics and music of the entire album.

Together with subsequent albums (L’imprudence and Bleu pétrole), Bashung indicates a new path for French rock music, undeniably a challenging path but aimed towards Europe, open to contaminations and encounters, capable of overcoming the language barrier (if it is a barrier...) with a high degree of musical sophistication and research.

Bashung's career was abruptly interrupted by his death, which occurred in 2009 at the age of only 62 due to lung cancer, leaving us with three albums of absolute value from which, hopefully, the new generations of French rock can restart.