French Films
Imaginary Future

Do you want yet another new sensation that rides the most trendy sound wave, the little band for your cerebral glossy dancefloor, crave tons of trivialities to feel postsnob scattered preferably failed? French Films have the recipe for you: 40% Drums, 30% Cure, 25% Joy Division, and 5% Smiths. Garnish with strobe lights, vintage footwear, ray-bans, and striped T-shirts. You will thus obtain five ash-blond Finnish merrymakers who delight in producing synth-garage epileptic fits.

Now the issue changes: because if you strive to listen with an open mind without prejudice, avoiding spouting nonsense, you can’t help but be impressed by the sound of these guys. Why? First of all, an almost perfect immediacy of melodic structures, the marked danceability dictated by the high bpm, the indispensable delays of the guitars that envelop the songs in dreamy layers. The synth, the choruses, the deep and sensual singing deliver the final blow in what seems to be an effective translation of sensations into music. It’s impossible not to empathize with these melodies that give themselves an epic tone while aware of toying with the listener, assuming unprecedented depths in their tragicomedy. You will then find yourself imagining parallel universes, projecting yourself into the feature film of your memories with new, predominantly changeable colors.

The dance starts with a meticulously measured, almost listless step, carving grooves in the memory with “This Dead Town”; a splinter of dopamine and a wrinkled santa fè with which we played garishly on the beach complement “You Don’t Know,” while the almost romantic “Golden Sea” takes on the flavor of new discoveries more than old defeats. “The Great Wave Of Light” is tender to the point of pain, and the granitic nakedness of “Living Fortress” is its perfect counterpart. The sacred cheerfulness of forced masses by relatives in “Escape In The Afternoon” precedes the schizophrenia of afternoons of existence left to marinate under the sun of youth in “Convict.” We gladly indulge in the frivolity of “New Zeland,” then comes the time of farewell, and the intro to “Up The Hill” seems more like a goodbye than a see you later: “Look up the hill and see, there is still that tree and it will bloom again, just like any other year,” aware of the fickleness that governs the world and that drives the human being, only the certainty that everything will go as it must lifts us.

That’s how five xylitol-ingesting blondes wrote an ordinary masterpiece, on an ordinary day, on an ordinary star of an ordinary galaxy.