By Juliette Tang
Listening to College and Anoraak, two talented DJs involved with the French collective Valerie, is like driving back to the balmy summer of 1981 in a white Camaro convertible with the top down, a cold Tab in your hand, and a tiny silver disco ball hanging from your rearview mirror. Valerie, a group of musicians from Nantes whose dramatis personae includes acts like Russ Chimes, Minitel Rose, and The Outrunners, among others, uses retrofuturistic synthpop to evoke the magical '80s teenage years they were too young to experience.
Valerie has a very specific fantasy of the '80s, informed vaguely by John Hughes movies and V. C. Andrews novels, by images of roller rinks, drive-thru diners, Orange Juliuses, and Love's Baby Soft perfume. But rest assured that their sound isn't trying to enshrine those bygone days. Rather, by traveling back in time to the '80s [Ed Note: Or rather, back to '80s nostalgia for '70s nostalgia for the '50s], Valerie reinvents a future that was dreamed back then but which never happened, a past-modern interpretation of utopia that creates an alternative to the present -- with dancing.
In conjunction with making me want to dance like a teenager, College and Anoraak made me want to drink Malibu and pineapple like a teenager, which was the only lamentable incident that occurred last Friday at Mezzanine, where Valerie ended their US tour. The show itself was exactly what I thought it would be: lively but controlled, suffused with an easy, dance-y energy that never quite reached the point of unbridled release.
College at Mezzanine. Image credit: Franklin Wong, www.wherewolves.net
College played a wonderfully non-trancey, entirely instrumental synth set that left me wishing I was Sarah Jessica Parker in Girls Just Want To Have Fun.
I danced alongside a young and culturally aware crowd had jerky '80s dancing down pat and sported the vestments of hipster iconography in various levels of annoying: deep V-neck t-shirts, Member's Only jackets, and asymmetrical hair. I found Anoraak less enjoyable than College, perhaps because I was distracted by his enormous sunglasses. Anoraak has an interesting sound, one that's equally influenced by European dancepop as it is by '80s disco, but the marriage of the two leaves me wishing for less novelty and more polish.
Anoraak at Mezzanine. Image credit: Franklin Wong, www.wherewolves.net
Perhaps because Mezzanine is so big and the show's attendance was merely modest, the mood leaned toward spacey and detached - though sometimes, music is best when enjoyed in an air-conditioned environment, unencumbered by sweaty moshers with substance-inflamed nostrils, on a dance floor big enough for you to have a little two-by-two space all to yourself, where you can lose yourself in the effluvium of youthful stirrings.
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