I mentioned before that there are six artists on this list for 1989 about whom I know nothing. Most of them come near then end, here’s the second of them. The cover gives nothing away, although the titles of the tracks are all in French. Possibly some kind of jazz, maybe zydeco, maybe chanson, maybe they’re a Quebecois thrash metal band, I don’t know. So the only thing to do is put them on ….
And… I was kind of right with all of those guesses, and also very wrong. They’re Swiss, and tend more towards the industrial sound, with a lot of similarity to Killing Joke and Einstürzende Neubauten in grinding thrashy guitars and heavy beats, but also occasionally with a dark cabaret feel like a French-language Tom Waits and a dash of the operatic nature of Laibach. The growling delivery of singer Franz Treichler adds to this feeling, creating a dark soundscape full of images of blood and thunder.
The opening track, La Fille De La Mort (The Daughter Of Death) is a sinister 8-minute reverie driven by an almost monotone accordion, which led me to think that perhaps we were getting some kind of Francophone experimentalism, Pere Ubu meets Jacques Brel, but when the beats of Rue des Tempêtes (Tempest Street) kicks in, it sets the tone for the rest of the album.
Handily the version I found on YouTube showed the French lyrics side-by-side with English translations, and there’s a lot of word play there that I don’t think always translates. The track L’Amourir, for example, sounds like Treichler plays upon “L’Amour” (Love) and “La Mort” (Death), and this kind of love / death dichotomy is throughout the album, possibly playing upon the notion of orgasm as “La petit mort”. Other lyrics are laced through with sexual imagery as well – the track Ville Nôtre (Our City) includes the lyrics “Your skin feels so hot, singing like the sun”, but is Treichler referring to the concrete of the city or to a lover? Or, more likely, both. The title track L’Eau Rouge (Red Water) talks of “The red water, the one men say that burns”, and of people dancing in the streets because “She’s back again”. The not-so-subtext to this is a reference to menstrual blood – hooray, “she” is back again, you’re not pregnant, perhaps. Part of me thinks only a man could write a poetic celebration of menstruation, women would be more likely to see it as something you just have to put up with. Except maybe Angela Carter.
Les Enfants (The Children) carries the theme of thunder to its peak, proclaiming that “The children want thunder to reverberate the world” and that they are fools (or literally beasts) for wanting trumpets – the message to me seems to be against the glorification of war. And that use of metaphor throughout makes the music quite fascinating. It’s a little like Metallica performing the poems of Rimbaud, perhaps, but it’s always nice to escape the Anglosphere for a while and experience something a little different.
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