Choses Sauvages ||| – Album Review

Choses Sauvages: Choses Sauvages |||      

Audiogram Records

All Formats

Out Now

Proudly French-speaking and award winning Canadian New Wave maestros Choses Sauvages (Wild Things) release album number three and promote it around Europe, including a brief visit to the UK. MK Bennett listens without prejudice.

If you are looking for a first-rate New Wave album to oil your arthritic knees and loosen the dust from your dancing shoes, then, like Sizu, you have struck gold. French-Canadian gentlemen of distinction and purveyors of basslines of pure, unbridled excellence, they are the amalgamated mass of every New Wave radio hit that ever made you move, unconsciously or otherwise. Old School, via the new production, it is the sound of mathematical angularity with enough modernist ingenuity to keep it original.

The Quebecois natives sing in French, which both matters and doesn’t matter. Traditional dialects are dependent upon tradition to keep them alive, and the inhabitants of Quebec have a complicated relationship with Canadian political and cultural institutions regarding the right to national self-identity, so the decision to sing in French may well have a meaning with far more depth than a three-minute pop song.

Phonetically, French is not dissimilar to English in any case, so couple that with the melodies, the mix not especially highlighting the vocals above the instruments, the art-punk credo of egalitarianism, and the possibly political can also be perfectly musical.

Fixe, like every song here, has a savant-level bassline, which is either played by singer and man about town Felix Belisle or his good friend Charles. Assuming Charles covers the live duties to give Felix more frontman time, then the recorded output would still be Felix himself. The internet suggests he wears a number of well-fitted hats, but it is the rhythms that elevate the record and set it apart. It becomes largely viewable through a dance/alt/punk lens, Death From Above and early LCD Soundsystem, emotion through machinery and the machine-like. Fixe is all this filtered through the late 70’s British post-punk scene. An excellent opener. Incendie au paradis is reminiscent of Talking Heads, with the corners shaved off and its hair slicked back, dirty like Vincents, Cassel or Gallo, it slinks and struts its considerable stuff with a hugely endearing confidence that makes it impossible to dislike.

Level up a l’interieur has a delightful tiny game introduction before it goes into the song itself, initially similar to one of those classic Squeeze narratives before revealing itself to be Scottish funk a la Orange Juice. Cours toujours is another brilliant and serpentine number, another vocal that you can nearly understand, but then the understanding moves and slips away, and you’re left once more with a magnificent bass line, a whistling melody, and a Motorik outro reminiscent of the much missed Talk Talk that should go for hours but it is clipped early like a beautiful racehorse.

Chaos initial sounds like Jane Birkin resting in a Parisian bistro while a band rehearses two doors away, featuring a vocal by Lysandre Menard that places the sound in a different time, an era where Serge reigned supreme, and the music adapted to the personality of the writer. It’s difficult to determine whether this is, in some ways, the showreel for Felix; such is his force of will and desire to explore the other. It certainly gives the music focus, this centring of character, and he does not disappoint.

Faux depart is lithe and athletic 80’s funk-pop, an absolute joy of a song, the sort of song that you grow a mullet for, John Taylor/Duran Duran/Nile Rodgers vibes that make you forget that language barrier and is not for the first time, way too short. If shock, awe and leave is the plan, then fair play, this song has barely started before it’s finished, leaving just an aura, an outline of bass. En joue is an urgent address, like Magazine with an upbeat storyline.

Deux assassins sounds like the soundtrack to a quirky detective series that was cancelled for being too odd, only to be brought back by public demand. Slightly discordant but acceptably so, with a perfect and captivating keyboard motif that is hard to forget, especially when left to its own devices during the middle-eight. It brings into focus the possibility that the obvious barriers to understood language could be and can be used as another texture to paint these pictures, not just in linguistic terms but in terms of pure sound. Without that ability to speak the language then one’s attention is forced to concentrate itself in other places.

Big Bang may be an outlier; it may be their future. It’s a krautrock delight, breathy and simultaneously driving, light but shadowy. It could be a fitting end to a private concept, but it is fantastic, nostalgic yet futuristic and bathed in light, the vocals an affect, and an effect.

It is an album to move to then, certainly, but it abounds in unexpected textures and small musical surprises that bear repeated listening, and the massed personality of the music and its makers has coagulated into a classic record, and one that comfortably sits with the works of its influences.

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All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram