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The Incredible Truth is an album about life.
The multi-instrumentalist and Parisian singer Sébastien Tellier bursts onto the world stage thanks to the track “Fantino” included in the 1999 compilation “Source Material” released by the French label Source and praised by the specialized press as "one of the loneliest sounds you will hear this year" (Rolling Stone Magazine). Our artist doesn't stop and between September 1999 and March 2000 completes his entire debut album "The Incredible Truth", released in 2001 by Record Makers, the label of Nicholas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel, the Air, just to give you an idea; and mixed by Tellier himself with help from Quentin Dupieux (a.k.a. Mr. Oizo).
The liner notes, written by the artist himself, recommend listening to the album alone and by candlelight, and with the help of some external agents, induced pulmonarily I might add, and introduce the listener to an introspective, cathartic, and surreal journey... where the sensations produced by our mind can easily merge with the notes floating in the room. European melodies can be felt throughout the journey, a strong reclamation of one's roots, broadening the spectrum of memories to the entire Old Continent, starting with “Oh… Malheur Chez O’Malley” where the synthesizers of early Battiato seem to perform a kraut pièce four hands with a piano borrowed from the theme of an English police drama. "Kazoo III" revives the atmospheres of a certain bitter comedy ranging from our Fantozzi's themes to the British sense of humor of the series "Robin's Nest," all revisited and seen through the eyes of the end-of-millennium tension... then landing on "Universe," a track that revives themes of the best (post-psychedelic) singer-songwriters who, in the early seventies, across the continent drew nourishment from the ashes of the atrocious realization of the Peace+Love thought’s defeat, leading subsequent generations to end-of-decade nihilism. "Trilogie Chien," composed of "L’Enfance D’Un Chien," "Une Vie De Papa," and "Fin Chien," seems to express the desire for revenge of all those compositions for cinema and television in Europe that accompanied the last cries of our Seventh Art against the overwhelming power of the cushioned cellulose from Hollywood invading the world.
“Grec” is a bucolic interlude that sounds like a heartfelt tribute for a good rest, made to poet Nick Drake and which paves the way for “Kissed By You,” where Syd Barrett indulges in a vision supported by his old Pink Floyd, accompanied by a small orchestra conducted by Serge Gainsbourg that is abruptly interrupted by Jimmy Page's acidic guitar for the finale. "Fantino" is one of the best examples of the development of pop music in the highest sense, a modern soundtracking of those little tapes that used to tell us fairy tales as children, and here the story seems to want to be the one-way journey undertaken by astronaut Bowman in "2001: A Space Odyssey." "Trilogie Femme," composed of "Vierges," "Une Vraie Maman," and "Face Au Miroir," opens with an acoustic guitar that revolves around Lucio Battisti and flows into a female chorus of cold sensuality, as only our artist and Gainsbarre could achieve, evolving into a lament stolen from Spanish flamenco singers laid out on a soft looping guitar that becomes tense in the final part to introduce a chilling series of female screams. "Black Douleur Video" are the closing titles, orchestrated emulating Cave's Bad Seeds paying homage to the darker part of Gainsbourg's work (ranging from "Histoire De Melody Nelson" to "L'Homme A Tete De Chou").
The candle, unknowingly, continues to burn, illuminating my room now silently suspended in melancholy, the typical melancholy felt by a child in the seventies... given to me by an artist who wasn't even born in the seventies.
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