By Todd Lavoie
It’s gonna hit! So says Montreal’s slinky experimentalists Feu Therese on the front of their new album, Ca Va Cogner (Constellation) - if my ever-rusting grasp of the French language serves me well. (Oh, my ancestors would be so proud.)
Now, I’m not sure if the “it” posed by the title is a sweaty funk-bomb or a seedy stab of gutter-synth - could be either, judging from the ample amounts of each being offered on its 37 fascinating minutes - but I reckon the not-knowing’s the whole idea: this Quebecois quartet seems to thrive on delivering the unexpected. Like a bucketload of bricks - that’s how it’s gonna hit, pumpkin, so duck and cover and let that heavy shit fall where it may. Me, I was blindsided. And it felt fantastic.
Fess-up time: I’m no expert on all of the intricate details of the willfully iconoclastic Constellation Records universe. (Yeah, a pun, I know.) I’ve adored the cinematic sturm-und-drang naysayers Godspeed You! Black Emperor from the get-go, and I’ve always enjoyed the elusive textures and chilling silences of Do Make Say Think, but there’s a hell of a lot of other stuff on that label I still have yet to hear. Fact is, I probably would’ve missed out on Feu Therese, too, if I hadn’t heard the last couple of tracks from Ca Va Conger playing in a record store recently. My point? Up until then, I’d always somehow expected the entire Constellations roster to be a pretty serious lot, all agitprop and clenched jaws - not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, when it’s done eloquently and thoughtfully, which Godspeed et al. have managed all along. So, I was more than a bit bowled over by Feu Therese’s playfulness. There’s an anything-goes spirit at work here which leaves me with a satisfied smirk every time. Picture this: Serge Gainsbourg has hooked up with Talking Heads and Brian Eno - y’know, back during their fertile Fear of Music/ Remain in Light (Sire) collaborative heyday - to pay homage to Kraftwerk and Can and early-'70s Italian thriller soundtracks. What could be better, really?
The Gainsbourg comparisons are inevitable, I suppose, given that most of us can probably only name a handful of French-crooning guys in the first place, but I’ll be good goddamned if Feu Therese vocalist-synth wizard Stephen de Oliveira doesn’t conjure some mighty convincing images of the Galoise-packin’, smooth-talkin’ subversive who passed away 16 years ago. It doesn’t take long: fifteen seconds into Ca Va Conger’s opening jitterer, “A Nos Amours,” and de Oliveira has already launched into a suave come-on (well, suave to these ears, anyway - with my French fluency rusting so impressively, I could very well be losing something in translation). Still, the song is called “To Our Love," after all, so my money’s on de Oliveira being sincerely debonair here, especially since it’s accompanied by Jonathan Parant’s shimmering, stuttering Afropop guitar line (or, rather, Afropop as filtered through a Talking Heads/Brian Eno lens - more CBGB’s, less Putumayo). A bouncing Slits-y bass line - courtesy of Alexandre St. Onge - and Luc Paradis’ intricate drum patterns rumble the romance along at a light-hearted clip, while de Oliveira’s unashamedly chintzy synth blares make for a fascinating juxtaposition. At around the two-minute mark, the bubbly number switches gears as the band makes itself over as a ghostly children’s choir, cooing and warbling away as the rhythm rumbles at twice the speed.
Its follow-up, “Visage Sous Nylon” - the inspiration for the album’s back cover photo, in which all four members are stocking-faced - dwells in a much less sunny universe than the opener. A menacing keyboard riff - or, menacing in a Giorgio Moroder kind of way - churns over a martial rhythm while Parant creates a gorgeously sordid urban drama with shards of just-killed-a-man guitar. “Les Deserts des Azurs” is Kraftwerk without the robots - instead, over mesmerizing keyboard flutters, elements of the Michael Brook/Edge/Daniel Lanois “infinite guitar” spiral and curlicue around insistent tom rhythms. It’s utterly gorgeous.
Then comes “Le Bruit Du Pollen La Nuit” - a deliciously unholy union of Gainsbourg, early Sisters of Mercy, and Italian soundtrack-savants Goblin - if you can imagine such a thing. Charging from out of nowhere, brandishing an early-'80s drum-machine torrent and classic goth-guitar fuzz, the song opens like the next best thing to busting out your old copy of the Sisters’ First and Last and Always (Merciful Release/ Warner). Then to top it off, de Oliveira brings out his best Andrew Eldritch impression: a fiendishly unfettered baritone bellow of what sounds like “you’re just a…just a… PRETTY BOY!” Enter the nagging scrapes of dueling synths, and the heavy-prog action gives a fine reminder of the brilliance of Goblin in fashioning frightful soundscapes. The music recedes deeply into the background as de Oliveira confides deep into your earhole - echoes of Gainsbourg’s occasionally unsettling love-chronicle Histoire de Melody Nelson (Polydor France), methinks. The goth-prog returns, only to recede again, and so on. As it fades into the darkest of oblivion, you’ll still be scratching your head. How do they come up with this stuff?
And just to widen the spectrum even further, the title track - a deep-orbiting five minutes of synth wooshes and swooshes giving way to a twinkling melody and a thankfully well-placed children’s choir - sits proudly with the finest ambient works of the Art of Noise or early Tangerine Dream, or hell, Boards of Canada. I have to be honest: a bunch of tykes cooing away sweetly tends to be a deal-breaker for me, but it works here magnificently.
Unfortunately, Feu Therese seem to be lacking in the music-video department, but I did find some pretty astounding footage of the band tearing it up with Damo Suzuki onstage. I never did get around to bringing up Can in all of my speechifying about the many wonders of Feu Therese, but once you’ve seen this, it’ll all make sense:
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