Last week, a DJ saved my cynical life, making me feel born-again love for terrestrial radio. Perhaps it’s the combination of the blogosphere’s white noise effect (you keep showing us new bands, kids, and it’s hard to tell which of your new, ever shuffling MP3-baseball cards are going to stick substantially to the spokes), and maybe it’s because I’m not in college anymore and don’t spend hours of my waking day listening and searching, trancelike, for music. Thankfully, I followed the spotlight of WDET Detroit’s music host Jon Moshier, who rocked a couple of jams by Fránçois and the Atlas Mountains “on the air” (a phrase that now falls flat across the vacuous status boards and Bandcamp streams).
E Volo Love , the group’s new album, proves to be just as effervescent as my understated wake-up call at how long it’d been since a local radio station turned me on to something new. Or, rather, I mean: something new that the hip blogoids would certainly be buzzing their usual buzzings-about, while still being something new that I wanted to go home to, download, and immerse myself in for the rest of that day’s evening and, in this case, the next morning, too. As you anticipate the sweet, charming sounds to come, let me unfairly simplify this sonic trailer by saying that Fránçois Marry’s sensibilities seem to have been shaped considerably by the company he’s kept, or at least fleetingly come into contact with, during his time in Bristol (having grown up in Southwest France), that being, among many: Camera Obscura, Panda Bear, Movitetone, and Patrick Wolf. And, listening to E Volo Love, it’s no shock when the press releases assure you that The Pastels are his heroes.
Herein lies whimsical waltzing and barefoot stomping, warm ‘n’ fuzzy resurrections of soothing old-tyme indie-baroque-pop shimmies for sunset revelry, splashed upon buoyant, Northern African-influenced rhythms and shining with the silky gloss of a keyed-up, Eastern-Euro-tinged lounge sashay. Fránçois’ dulcet vocal delivery is almost debonair if it weren’t welcomingly weird-ified by that high-ish, croaky, nasal tone. The instrumentation begins with an Obscura-esque-aesthetic, with those syrupy surf guitars strumming along lilting, daydreamy pop hooks. But, for this writer, the magic manifests through the rhythm, swayed by a couple of things: the first being Marry’s own upbringing (his mom was raised in Cameroon, and even then there’s a substantial amount of sounds spilling up northward on the Mediterranean into the French scenes from Tunisia/Algeria/Morocco); and second, E Volo was mixed by Jean-Paul Romann, fairly fresh off his collaboration with Mali-based blues troubadours Tinariwen on their sensational Tassili.
Strangely, Volo’s most palatable, potentially radio-friendly jam, the driving, riffed-out-road-trip slide of “City Kiss,” is the one that feels most out of place, setting aside that you have to buy the ticket for this particular ride of an eclectic, young, ambitious French songwriter transfusing his own strange ideas on pop through his lifelong penchant for African rhythms while coming of musical maturity in the UK. As audacious as all that is, to begin with, it’s still the heart of this album’s character and should be stuck with, like on the dazzling and effective book-ending tracks. Whereas: swap out his wispy warble and let the instruments of “City Kiss” stand alone and you’d swear it were a Sea and Cake B-side that they cut with a few pair of string and brass players. Maybe that’s where Marry, now bolstered by a trio of talented players (who he eventually found through wide-eyed advert postings offering his trumpet skills “to anyone, really”) wants to go on the next album.
Now, it’s one thing to over-exaggerate the pure and refreshing feeling it was to finally get turned onto something by the radio — like the old days… — but it’s quite another to follow through, dig into that “Buried Treasure,” and find something comparably satisfying, something not yet overblown and not overly stylized and not overly saccharine, something that you could float on while still grooving to an interesting beat. Tune in next time.
More about: François and the Atlas Mountains
