2016 - France
Coldwave, Electropop
Mémoires vives (Vivid Memories) may be the album I’ve listened to the most. The first album by the French coldwave band Grand Blanc took the French music stage by surprise, releasing a record as powerful as poetic. Just like the cover showing an damaged car lighted by colourful spotlights, Mémoires vives focuses on the distress felt by a young generation of people struggling to let themselves go without falling into self-destruction. With a feverish rock tinted with electronic textures, Grand Blanc is lead by two voices, Camille Delvecchio and Benoît David, mostly mixed at the same level as the instrumentation, creating an eerie and disenchanted atmosphere for wandering souls. In 13 songs, Grand Blanc’s Mémoires vives doesn’t have a single weak moment. They never stop, always raging, each songs containing multiple brilliant ideas, playing with despair, seedy joys and empty rooms. In their world, it’s always feel like a constant nightime, or a constant dawn. The sun is stuck on the edge of the Earth, and they contemplate this everlasting moment with a ferocious or delicate temper, their minds drifting away.
Between Alain Bashung and Joy Division, the lyrics of Grand Blanc, even though they follow a narrative, mainly remains blurry and difficult to precisely understand. Every song is made with wordplays that are sadly impossible to translate. They play with sonorities, polysemy and the structure of their verses are highly inspired by French poetry, full of chiasmus, oxymorons, analogies and alliterations mutiplying the meanings you can find within each song. This lyricism refusing any kind of straightforward reasoning left many listeners wondering why this band was singing about, or if those lyrics were nothing more but the pretentious behaviour of a band drowning in their own ideas. But when you pay attention to every word, you’ll immediately notice how strong the feelings they’re conveying are. The ending of Désert désir for instance is a line of words with similar sonorities “The mad passerbys pace up and down / Dirty town lonely guy vice and versa / Breath pick bad luck molar / Red light the rage color anger.” And just like that, the story becomes a painting, the painting a feeling, and the feeling a memory.
Mémoires vives is overflowing. There are too much words, heavy sounds, explosions, screams, frustrations, desires, death, contemplation and sleepless nights. It’s a modern overdose, a bursting state of being finding solace in the very last song off the album, Montparnasse. Most of the songs of Grand Blanc work in a toponomic way. It’s about places, rooms, hotels or streets they’ve been. Montparnasse is an area in the South of Paris famous for its black tower but also for its cemetary where are buried Charles Baudelaire, Serge Gainsbourg and Samuel Beckett. The heartbreaking Montparnasse, whith its cryptic lyrics, could be the story of someone close to dying, telling everyone around him not to mind his departure, to dance as much as they can while he ends his journey on Earth, happy with his past life. He asks them to bring flowers, and to only use dew to water them. And the very last sentence says something like “Celebrate me like your own summer”. In other words, Montparnasse ends the album with a death like a celebration of every other human being remaning alive. Grand Blanc have no tears left to cry. The sun finally moves because the fear of disappearing isn’t there anymore.
Between Alain Bashung and Joy Division, the lyrics of Grand Blanc, even though they follow a narrative, mainly remains blurry and difficult to precisely understand. Every song is made with wordplays that are sadly impossible to translate. They play with sonorities, polysemy and the structure of their verses are highly inspired by French poetry, full of chiasmus, oxymorons, analogies and alliterations mutiplying the meanings you can find within each song. This lyricism refusing any kind of straightforward reasoning left many listeners wondering why this band was singing about, or if those lyrics were nothing more but the pretentious behaviour of a band drowning in their own ideas. But when you pay attention to every word, you’ll immediately notice how strong the feelings they’re conveying are. The ending of Désert désir for instance is a line of words with similar sonorities “The mad passerbys pace up and down / Dirty town lonely guy vice and versa / Breath pick bad luck molar / Red light the rage color anger.” And just like that, the story becomes a painting, the painting a feeling, and the feeling a memory.
Mémoires vives is overflowing. There are too much words, heavy sounds, explosions, screams, frustrations, desires, death, contemplation and sleepless nights. It’s a modern overdose, a bursting state of being finding solace in the very last song off the album, Montparnasse. Most of the songs of Grand Blanc work in a toponomic way. It’s about places, rooms, hotels or streets they’ve been. Montparnasse is an area in the South of Paris famous for its black tower but also for its cemetary where are buried Charles Baudelaire, Serge Gainsbourg and Samuel Beckett. The heartbreaking Montparnasse, whith its cryptic lyrics, could be the story of someone close to dying, telling everyone around him not to mind his departure, to dance as much as they can while he ends his journey on Earth, happy with his past life. He asks them to bring flowers, and to only use dew to water them. And the very last sentence says something like “Celebrate me like your own summer”. In other words, Montparnasse ends the album with a death like a celebration of every other human being remaning alive. Grand Blanc have no tears left to cry. The sun finally moves because the fear of disappearing isn’t there anymore.