Feu Thérèse
Feu Thérèse

Three minutes and 33’’ of hisses and buzzes overlapping.
It starts like this.
At 3’34, bass, drums, and a little keyboard suggesting a rhythmic and circular pattern come in.
At 3’55’’ the guitar begins to scratch the surface. In bursts. Roughly.
4’ and 09”: a merry-go-round passes over the small convoy of sounds. Synthetic spores, intermittent music box.
Four and 39’’: a synthetic breeze rises. It blows in the gaps between one sound and another.
But the space is already quite saturated.
And everything wraps around. Spirals. Growing in intensity. In volume.
In the breeze, a “symphonic” temptation makes its way, fighting with a gurgling matter. At 6’02’’ it finds a way to emerge, but only because everything stops and the trail is abruptly cut off, along with the rest.

“Ferrari En Feu”, the track that opens the self-titled debut album of this Canadian band, pays homage to one of the fathers of concrete music and its contamination with certain electronic sound solutions, Luc Ferrari.
In the next four, the album immerses you in a magma where you recognize echoes of a Floydian psychedelia from the early days, the sound and attitude of a certain edgy and restless wave (it's the second time in a few days that I find affinities or traces of This Heat in recent productions), hints of a cosmic vocation that, however, intersects with dissonances and layers of sounds, often deconstructed in a sort of free form, in one case with almost jazzy overtones.

An example of this indefinable and elusive nature is provided by the second track, “Mademoiselle Gentleman”, which opens with thunderous bursts on an incessant rhythmic base supported by an obsessive bass. Reiterations and screeches. Electric shocks and electronic splinters on a seething sound organism with wild guitars. Then, suddenly, silence. Crossed only by the release of saturation. And from the silence restarts that bass (so similar to the pulsing soul of the best “post-punk” drifts) which marks the course of a second part where the sounds dissolve into a dreamy and dazed solution: flares of effects and electric debris. Treated voices in the background.

“Tu N'Avais Qu'Une Oreille” would seem, at the beginning, a psycho-tinged version of a classic post-rock track, with a “reciting” voice whispering while the guitars around release chords and discharges on the drumming rebounds. A sluggish pace, which becomes insistent, relatively slow and alienated, yet loading with sound and tension, spilling into a finale again saturated and crashing.

“L'Homme Avec Coeur Avec Elle” has a space soul, but a frayed rock body. And a heart that is tempted by the void again, in the center of the piece. But it is just another digression, to then allow, on a base of guitars dispensing an electric undertow to a screeching of drugged seagulls, the entrance of a sax in the finale. To outline a superimposed nocturnal skyline, in a frame with expressionist movements, on an improbable beach blinded by an acid sun.

“Ce N'Est Pas Les Jardins Du Luxembourg”, which closes the journey with twelve minutes delivered to a relaxed atmosphere, traversed by slight sound interferences on a carpet woven by a muffled organ, percussion and light but sporadic eastern-spiced arpeggios, entrusts the reins to one of the duo's two souls. That more technological and experimental soul, represented by Alexandre St-Onge (Shalabi Effect), coexists with Jonathan Parant's restless guitar solutions (Fly Pan Am) giving life to a side project that offers here a taste of the possible outcomes of a rather unusual and personal crossing.
Yet, scattered in a vocation that seems more aimed at creating expansion spaces for many suggestions rather than mastering them, defining their contours, concentrating and directing their substantial propulsive energy.
However, in the forty minutes of this debut, released by Constellation, contrary to what I would have expected and despite little familiarity with the matter, the disorientation and apparent incompleteness of this psycho-free noise hybrid added with electronics have produced a strange sound substance, that repeated listens do not reveal as any less enjoyable.

In short, a rating between 3 and 4, depending on which aspect of the affair attracts you more.
And the mention for one of the many unusual proposals coming from that seemingly inexhaustible reservoir that Canada seems to have become in recent years.