Brisa Roché - An American in Paris

There's a curious red thread connecting the artistic and personal trajectory of Brisa Roché to that of Cocorosie, and of Sierra Casady in particular. That anything-but-easy childhood, for starters, as the daughter of separated and incurably self-centred parents, hippies of the last convoy with a taste for nomadism and a fine stock of combative eccentricity. Then a cultured yet essentially anarchic musical education, built in solitude by a self-taught artist chasing her own dream and making do as best she could, never ruling out any alternative from the outset. And finally the almost inevitable escape, the United States abandoned for the only possible destination, fateful Paris, to feed her own bohemian ideal and not miss her appointment with a modest but real success, scheduled as if in the most gripping of screenplays. Granted, in Roché's case there was no sister to reunite with and be infected by, the crucial impulse toward freak extravagance. In the most convenient of metaphors, for her that self-discovery became an exquisitely individual matter, and the path was travelled with greater consistency with her premises and her actual feelings, with no kitsch radicalism and no cheap effects beyond an always rather intriguing look, that of an American Björk.

A hard-won apprenticeship

Brisa was born on April 26, 1974 in Arcata, a fairly isolated university town in far northern California, famous at the time for its hippie community. She's the only daughter of an unconventional couple, him a writer, her an artist, who raised her amid adults only, without even the comfort of a proper given name: until adolescence everyone calls her "Baby Girl", while later on she'll go by the no less cumbersome name of La Brisa Day Roché.

As a child she lives on a sailboat, but her parents' separation marks the start of an even more chaotic, rootless existence. She spends most of her time with her father, a maverick who travels constantly and never skimps on adventure and frenzy, including a few run-ins with the law over drug dealing. With her young mother and stepfather she spends many weekends that are no less alienating, in a self-built mountain chalet with no electricity, phone or hot water, experimenting with meditation and naturism, and beginning to exercise her creative streak in solitude. Her domestic soundtrack at this stage consists of the lullabies her mother constantly improvises, which Brisa's ear absorbs along with the sounds of the radio, the blues heard on turntables in her father's countless homes, and the children's choirs she herself performs in during brief stays abroad, in Russia or Romania.

A neighbour teaches her to play a rudimentary drum kit, which she soon abandons for the acoustic guitar. Influenced by poetry books literally devoured by the light of kerosene lanterns, the young girl writes her first songs and even records them, first on a Philips K7 cassette recorder, then in an Arcata recording studio rented for half a day. It's 1984. The record, at least conceptually comparable to the eponymous debut of eleven-year-old Björk, will remain a memory exclusive to the artist herself. At sixteen she leaves her uncomfortable maternal refuge for good to move permanently in with her father, in Seattle. For an amateur musician, ending up in the capital of grunge at the height of the movement might seem like a stroke of luck, and the energy certainly helps Roché sharpen her passion. The influence of that scene, however, remains marginal, and the girl, who cuts her teeth in a more traditionalist high-school band — The Amazing Dimestore — performs as a solo busker at the public market on weekends. Her father's sudden death reshuffles the deck. For a year Brisa, by then influenced by Can, by Joni Mitchell and by a still very young PJ Harvey, lives in Paris and gets by playing in a roots trio. She then returns home and begins attending Reed College in Portland (where, among others, Steve Jobs studied without graduating), even though her energies are entirely devoted to the obsession of a new band.

Our subject then switches to electric guitar and sings in an emo band called Bing Ra, which she soon abandons, along with her studies, thoroughly unsatisfied. Back in Arcata, she swears to herself she's done with music, only to find herself singing old folk tunes every time she hops on her bike for a night ride. She then decides to give jazz a chance, a genre she loves and begins to approach during the months she spends marooned in the New Mexico desert, the rather passive girlfriend of a punk-rock band's bassist. The stormy end of that relationship proves to be the turning point she needed. It's 2001, and Roché is back in the French capital, this time to stay. Her immersion in the world of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés jazz bars is total, all-consuming, and the apprenticeship proves much harder than expected: there's never enough money, precariousness wears her down, the promoters are unscrupulous and the audiences are unfailingly rude. And yet the music makes every effort worthwhile, as does the collaboration with colleagues who are equally underpaid but hugely motivated. "I lived the life of a 1950s jazz musician," she will later recall, well after landing a deal with the prestigious Blue Note in 2005. The signing comes gradually, thanks to her voice and a stage presence described as "ninja-queen-like", which makes her impossible to ignore.

And it's thanks to a self-produced record released two years earlier in a tiny print run, which earns her many more dates across Paris. Soothe Me contains a dozen reworkings, mostly jazz standards such as Duke Ellington's "Azure Interlude", trumpeter Benny Carter's "Melancholy Lullaby" and Jimmy Van Heusen's "Oh, You Crazy Moon", but also Richard Rodgers' "Glad To Be Unhappy" and Burton Lane's "I Hear Music", both musical-theatre composers, Hungarian composer Rezső Seress's "Gloomy Sunday" and several other highly popular songs, all from the '30s and '40s, including Sonny Burke's "Black Coffee" and Hoagy Carmichael's "I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes)", made famous by Chet Baker, as well as "Jim", made famous by Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.

It's her jazz record, and Brisa makes the most of it to get known on the local circuit, even though that same year she had already begun exploring other musical territory, the recordings (made by students at a sound engineering school as an end-of-course project) don't satisfy her, and the tracks included are certainly not among her favourites or among the best of the repertoire she had long performed live. In short, a work not so representative of what the singer had already begun to create or had in mind for the near future; an album that is, in fact, disowned, left to oblivion with no further reissues, and remains today virtually unobtainable even on streaming platforms.

Meanwhile Brisa Roché is ready for her official debut, The Chase, a monumental collection of twenty-one tracks that already hints clearly at the girl's expressive potential, released in October 2005 on Metro Blue, an EMI-Capitol subsidiary via Blue Note. The protagonist of the chase evoked in the title is herself, a provocative siren front and centre in the cover photo, who in the press notes describes the album as "cinematic, intimate, generous, grand, feminine, rock'n'roll and sixties" and opens on the note of a pleasant bedroom noise-pop ("Airplane"), before toying with velvet textures and dreamy atmospheres, with the fluted seductions of arrangements that are nonetheless never overblown, and with that nasal, endearingly childlike voice of hers, perfect for soft-toned pieces like the sing-song single "Mistery Man".

Her winking, gently reverb-soaked easy-listening, the fruit of double bassist Daniel Yvinek's shrewd production, is the winning formula of this important first step, with the American already proving worldly-wise and thoroughly at ease in her eclectic flights of fancy.

Her love of jazz and sophisticated chanson, in any case, can't be contained for long, and she proves to possess real class as well as an undeniable grasp of the genre's conventions. It happens in "Dans le vert de ses yeux" as in "Du bout des yeux" and in "Coco", another single, an exquisitely refined exercise in style of a kind that even the far more celebrated Coralie Clement only rarely manages to pull off. But she doesn't stop at an aestheticising display of nuance and shading, because the Californian artist brings to the table a warmth that's never cold, an unfeigned sensuality and an impressionist mastery (the excellent closer "Summer Surprise") that sweep aside the anonymous laziness of stereotype and leave no one indifferent. These are three-minute-and-done songs, very well constructed, given bite by the guitars (Ludovic Bruni's and Brisa's own, nicknamed "the Destroyer"), all without ever betraying their young author's fresh-faced look or her refined musical training, here steered toward a thoroughly enjoyable sense of abandon. With "Helmet Ray" she reveals a garage-soul explosiveness worthy of the Berlin circus of future friend King Khan and the Sensational Shrines, while "Flying Too High" stands out as a sophisticated blues transfiguration, refined yet eccentric enough to remain thoroughly enjoyable.

Already evident here is her predilection for an elegant, dusty brand of musical retro-modernism, close kin both to the more calligraphic Stereolab and to pre-mannerist Nouvelle Vague ("Little Robot"). So it is that, sometimes within the space of a single track ("Warned"), the most delicate lullabies ignite without warning into blazing bossa nova fragments.

But Roché also opens herself up to the allure of a restrained exoticism, shining with the charm and gentleness of a spare voice-and-guitar acoustic setting, the kind that gives you genuine goosebumps ("Torchlight"). Or else she plays the intriguing femme fatale, the spotlight trained exclusively on her voice with musical accompaniment pared down to the bare essentials ("A Luxury", "Baby Shut Your Eyes", the languid wink of "Now That It's Long Over"). One way or another, the engine driving it all remains the boundless wonder Brisa is capable of, a pocket-sized phantasmagoria not yet adulterated by too much formal artifice and therefore genuine in its candour. The result is a fully rounded, multicoloured, multi-perspective work that showcases the versatile talent of an already first-rate performer, compelling without ever lapsing into preciousness or crowd-pleasing poses.

It's particularly in the sensual rewritings of her eccentric chamber-pop sensibility that the most interesting ideas of an album that, in its own way, proves genuinely exciting come together, given how well it manages to reinvent and marry registers that would seemingly sound irreconcilable, or would appear to have nothing new left to say. A demonstration of superlative freedom straddling genres, a harmonious blend of high and low that has the merit of never degenerating into garish kitsch. The Chase is received very favourably by the specialist press, but Roché once again declares herself not entirely satisfied. To write and record the sophomore album, she temporarily returns home, to her native Arcata, together with three members of the French band Frank!!! (Jeff Hallam, Sebastien Buffet, Fred Fortuny), Henry Hirsch, Lenny Kravitz's trusted producer, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner.

If the distribution of its predecessor had flopped in the United States and half of Europe, with Takes the singer seems determined not to repeat that washout. She's helped by the decision to finally abandon jazz inflections in favour of a breezy folk-pop sound, by the striking mise captured in the cover shot, and by her new label Discograph, independent but far more active than the major she'd worked with before. The change of label causes a six-month delay in the actual release, pushed from March to autumn 2007, but the quality of the record makes the setback irrelevant.

The ideal granddaughter of Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell, younger sister of Björk and Cat Power, Brisa Roché forcefully asserts herself within the fertile litter of young "singer-songwritresses" that also includes the already-mentioned CocoRosie, Joanna Newsom, Shara Worden (aka My Brightest Diamond), St. Vincent, and who knows how many others still waiting to be discovered and given their moment to shine. Not exactly a sisterhood, mind you, nor even a proper movement; what unites them, more than any specific musical trait or birth certificate, are certain shared features that vividly mark each of their personalities: a highbrow musical background, overseas reference points, a restlessly nomadic countercultural heritage, watered-down hippie dreaminess, somewhere between the oneiric and the fairy-tale. Unlike her compatriots (and now fellow city-dwellers) the Casady sisters, Brisa isn't interested in injecting the pop-song germ into the empty, open, floating forms of experimentation; if anything, she compresses those forms into a catchy simulacrum of Sixties melodic nostalgia, with results that are at times almost indistinguishable from the original models. She herself admits to having given in to an ecstatic journey back into the 60's hippie memories that filled her childhood, from Californian pop to the vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys, reread through the ironic sensuality of French yéyé pop (Gainsbourg, Renard, Hardy).

Valid testimony to this, in this sense, comes from the choral rapture (and the Mamas & Papas-style arrangement) of "Heavy Dreaming", the Cocorosie-style polyphony (there two voices that sound like one, here one voice split in two) propped up by an airy Spectorian-style girl-group accompaniment on "The Drum", "Trampoline" (an almost Hazlewood/Sinatra-style duet, with the male counterpart kept in the shadows), "The Choice" (featuring the same male voice — Philippe "Philon" Rigal — mimicking a sample of Petula Clark's "I Will Follow Him", known in Italian as Betty Curtis's "Chariot"!) and that delight that is "Whistle" (a spaghetti-western theme whistled over two balalaika chords).

Then, that the conjuring talents of demoiselle Roché can also be brought to bear in less frivolous contexts is proven by the chamber lieder "The Building" (for guitar, vibraphone and cello) and "Breathe In Speak Out" (somewhere between Cat Power and Ellen Friedberger), the a cappella space-pop of "High" (the psychotropic soliloquies of the Byrds delivered in Beach Boys-style choral form), the atonal melismas of the raga-pop "Halfway On" and the Van Dyke Parks-style orchestral piece "Pitch Black Spotlight" (with New York-school feedback and pop-noise off-beats). A compositional talent capable of voluptuously blowing on her own house of cards to transform it into something as elusive and ineffable as the hieratic bossa/chanson "The Mummy", the bistrot jazz-lounge of "Call Me" (a Billie Holiday peering out onto the Rive Gauche from a balcony crowned with petunias), and the ghost-track "Ali Baba", pure Indo-shamanic sorcery, a mediumistic polyphony somewhere between Krishna and Manitou.

In short, everything invites easy, favourable predictions. It seems inevitable to foretell that both the mainstream juggernaut (MTV already has an eye on her, and she doesn't hide that she'd love nothing more than to sell records by the truckload) and the elitist world of the singer-songwriter (all this unbearable lightness rests on roots fed by an uncommon creative depth) would soon have to bow before the oracle of a predestined Brisa Roché. Instead, beyond a few glowing reviews, Takes quickly drops off the radar without even matching the modest success of its predecessor. The Californian doesn't let it faze her and, together with a handful of musicians from Lille (Jay in Space, Lena Deluxe, Pirzo, Richard Horon), embarks on a six-month European tour that culminates with a performance at the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival in 2008.

The Invisible Girl

To record the new album, our artist is once again back home, in New York, this time with producer Rémy Deliers. All Right Now hits stores in September 2010, marking a further step forward into territory clearly shaped by easy-listening cross-pollination, but it's also a work that feels like a reckoning. Written during her pregnancy, it's the album of many lives, intertwined or parallel, within Brisa's young and eventful existence: the Californian child of unconventional intellectuals, raised in ever-precarious, alternative settings; the post-punk kid in love with PJ Harvey, roaming post-grunge America in search of a conflicted artistic identity; the chanteuse fronting a band of jazz musicians, making a name for herself in the smoky clubs of fin-de-siècle Paris; the cultured, ambitious but still little-known pop alchemist of the second half of the last decade. It's this bildungsroman that the Franco-American artist's third album tells. Not so much through the filigree of the lyrics as by following the logical thread of the influences and musical weaves — composite, disorienting — that make up the sonic palette the author draws on, more than once.

Where its predecessor was a little gem of folk-pop in the broadest sense of the term, shimmering and sophisticated, one that seemed to place Roché within a stone's throw of quality mainstream, the new record rediscovers a sui generis strand of American alt-rock singer-songwriter craft, pursuing oblique, eclectic, juxtaposed trajectories. The strength of Brisa's songwriting, however, emerges unscathed and easily recognisable: in the gushing, refined melodies, in the essential arrangements that rely entirely on touch and restraint (the instrumentation is pared down to the bare essentials: drums, bass, guitar, keyboards or synth), and in the central role played within them by her vocal delivery, among the most silvery and versatile on today's scene.

To the first thread — the childhood blurred with nostalgia that soars over the sun-scorched, scrub-covered hills of the West Coast — belong tracks like the opener "Stone Trade" (rocky and faintly psychedelic) and the almost Byrds-like surrender (but with PJ on vocals) of the gorgeous "Past Contemplative". Roché's autobiographical creativity then spreads in every direction: the little vignettes of a diligent Kate Bush disciple ("Penetrate", which at times recalls Bat For Lashes, and "Open Your Lock"), the operatic post-wave somewhat in the vein of My Brightest Diamond on "Hard As Love", the nervy, pop-leaning "It's All Right", the disco-oriented sound of a little masterpiece like "Sweat King" (somewhere between Talking Heads and ABBA, with sexy French murmurs à-la Birkin). In this natural yet eccentric web of (self-)quotation, the freak sketches of "Do What You Do" (practically a blues progression with a futurist, hyper-accelerated jingle chorus) and "Green Light" (bittersweet west coast sound that morphs into a Spectorian girl-group finale) coexist effortlessly with the retro, European, classicist pop of "Bloom" and "Get Down".

Once again, then, a precious record — yet one that enjoys very little visibility almost anywhere and fails to even match the modest acclaim of its predecessor. Disappointed, Brisa unplugs for a while and goes back to performing only occasionally, and only in France, in small clubs. It's precisely during this phase that she decides to launch a side project limited to the French circuit, The Lightnin 3, a three-voice outfit shared with another American resident in Paris, Moriarty frontwoman Rosemary Standley, and with Ndidi Onukwulu, Nigerian but born in Canada.

The trio's live shows go down so well that putting out a dedicated album becomes almost inevitable. It's released by the small True Velvet label in October 2012, titled Morning, Noon and Night. The opening is sumptuous and truly gripping, with the Californian's voice tackling an infectious rereading of Ruby Andrews' "Casanova (Your Playing Days Are Over)". The expressive direction is a shimmering, Bacharach-esque soul, lit now by horns, now by the female chorus, and illuminated by whichever singer's virtuosity happens to be on lead duty. A less risky, more conservative outing for her, but also clearly the fruit of a disengagement felt as a necessity. The tone stays upbeat and sparkling even when lead vocal duties fall to one of her two companions, starting with Onukwulu's chamber-gospel turn on "Show Me". Particularly lovely suggestions arrive from the calypso-meets-doo-wop version of "Bette Davis Eyes", entrusted to the excellent Standley, who on "The Light Pours Out Of Me" upends Magazine's post-punk, presenting herself as the perfect female double of the most lyrical Tim Buckley.

The little record soon reveals itself for what it is: a refined divertissement, recorded with taste and undeniable professionalism by a trio of performers in holiday mode (though never sloppy) who share North American roots, a passion for Paris, for Sixties music, Stax and Motown, Aretha Franklin, and girl-groups in the style of the Shirelles or the Supremes. The morning, noon and night of the title correspond to three musical souls that harmonise and complete one another admirably. Ndidi stands out for her versatility, convincing as a world-weary femme fatale on a particularly smouldering "Cherry Bomb" (originally by the Runaways), more measured on the R&B send-off "Love & Communication" (by Cat Power, no less), but in any case destined to stand out as the spiciest voice of the three. Brisa herself, for her part, fares wonderfully, ranging from the bubblegum revival of the deliciously frivolous "The Safety Dance" (by new-wavers Men Without Hats) to a surprising rendition of Big Star's "Thirteen", superb in the contrast between the nostalgic charm of the delivery and the warm, brassy sweep of the arrangement, by way of the flourishes and affectation of Dee Dee Warwick's "You're No Good", delivered like a true-blooded chanteuse.

Four years later, Roché is once again in the places of her childhood. It took her a decade and a half to bring that exciting bohémienne life experience, as an adopted Parisian, to a close and return to her native California. Not the California of beaches and twelve-lane highways, but its harsh, isolated counterpart up north, dotted with redwoods as far as the eye can see and home to mountain lions. A few months earlier, in the course of 2015, she had posted a slew of unreleased demos on YouTube, accompanied by homemade, unpretentious videos, almost as if she meant to empty every drawer of its leftovers before setting off.

In her chalet studio in the forests above Arcata, she records the new album, only her fourth in a dozen years, making clear that what we should really be talking about is not so much a return as a farewell. A farewell to the "happy meeting between Feist and My Brightest Diamond" she was once hailed as, back in her days as a budding revelation. A farewell to the Spectorisms, the Sixties melodic nostalgia, the yéyé chanson, the chamber lieder and the spacey folk of Takes, but also to the Bat For Lashes-style eclecticism and the retro-futurist pop of All Right Now. With Invisible 1, the metamorphosis is complete — and it's unlikely to stop here.

The diversionary strategy had actually started a while back, with the divertissement "Jamaican Boy", a reggae revamp of Estelle and Kanye West's "American Boy", shared in 2009 with Bost & Bim. Following that same path, but refining the formula with class, the artist had given life in 2012 to the above-mentioned side project Lightnin 3, before extending her creative license with a handful of songs written specifically for the soundtrack of Jalil Lespert's film "Yves Saint Laurent".

Her latest effort is an album of contrasts, remarkably precise in conveying that sense of inevitable uprooting. Half the songs are intimate, co-written with Thibaut Barbillon, half are more outgoing and electronic, shaped with the help of Jérôme Caron, aka Blackjoy, and Marc Collin of Nouvelle Vague. "Lit Accent" and the single "Vinylize" pick up where things left off, a mutant chamber-pop, just enough to catch you off guard at the first refrain with its ethereal lift, chant-like detours worthy of the best Oh Land, in one case, or of The Brunettes in drag, in the other.

Of course, beyond the elegance and restraint of her touch, a bit of disorientation when dealing with such an artifice is to be expected. Right after, the synthetic beats of "Echo Of What I Want" unambiguously tip the balance toward electro-pop, but the singer proves very adept at not dulling the quality of her ideas despite the inevitably chilly dress it's given. Like her Scandinavian counterpart, she manages to breathe life and freshness into it thanks to her celestial flourishes, the curlicues of a voice never so graceful and bold in its explorations.

With the delicacy and meticulousness of a dancer, Brisa uses her voice to move, like so many mostly Nordic artists working in equally bare-bones settings. Here and there she also brings to mind Björk's "Vespertine", so that the vague physical resemblance ultimately finds a necessary echo on the purely musical level too. And her playful streak pays off, in the end, on a "Baby Come Over" that is as buoyant as it is uneven, once again lit up by a discipline truly suited to avoiding redundancy, to not being crushed under the weight of its own formal devices.

Invisible 1 is an easy-listening record written, as ever, with great craft, but inevitably defused in its explosiveness by the ever-present production tweaks, never quite tacky yet often garish or aggressive. Nomen omen, "Disco" leans into a danceable, lounge-room frivolity laced with all sorts of references, from funk to soul, from revived jazz to lounge. Inventiveness and skill are once again in no short supply, though the new, flashy and sophisticated expressive outfits end up stealing all the attention and blunting the edge of a songwriting that's otherwise, as usual, admirable. At times Roché rediscovers that transparency so natural to her, though she often still seems a touch distracted in her confidential, knowing, slightly coy poses. In her boundless comfort zone, she tends to let the game go slack, and in more than one passage she falls into self-indulgence, unable to touch the heart the way she once could so effortlessly thanks to her superlative flair. So, except when Brisa takes refuge in all-encompassing enchantment (the farewell of "Find Me") or in the apparent truth of a far more sober voice-and-guitar setup (the understated yet proud "You Like A Fire", for instance, multi-layered and gently otherworldly), the occasional yawn feels like an almost unavoidable toll.

She continues to favor languid, nocturnal moods that, safe from blatant imitation, still come off superbly and hold their own with a decimal point's margin even against a standout like Britta Phillips. It's on tracks like "Each One Of Us" that the American singer shows the full perfection of her charm, although, unlike Ms. Wareham, she has no interest in settling into that stereotyped formula and diversifies her approach a bit too much, veering toward a folk made of whispers and subtle symphonic intrusions ("Walk With Me") as well as a stripped-down gospel ("Diamond Snake"), adept at dodging the traps of kitsch but not quite as able to move you as she once did.

The result, steeped in color, is thus a refined but in some ways unwieldy work, bloated and scattered, perhaps well beyond its original intentions.

Two years later, here's something completely different: an album in the name of the father, painful, pared-down, mature, and black-and-white like Jean-Baptiste Mondino's cover art. Brisa Roché changes skin in a wholly unexpected way, and her startling fifth collection asserts itself fairly emphatically among the most compelling titles in her catalogue, buoyed by an emotional as well as expressive urgency the Californian songwriter had never shown at such a level before. As she herself explained, the songs on Father deal with the sweet and often uneasy experiences of her life up to age sixteen, when she lost her father, and are framed as "stories of loss, dreams and luminosity." Setting aside the multicolored frivolity of her recent work, the singer chooses the risk of a difficult, painful path, but one with undeniably radiant and deeply evocative turns. To pull it off, she went back to a wealth of material already shared with fans over the years via YouTube, in the form of rough-and-ready demos, opting for the professional help of the outstanding John Parish and Ali Chant. Well, from the smoky Paris of jazz clubs to the Parish of obvious American associations, there's a whole stylistic galaxy to travel.

The most explicit reference to the father figure in this collection of memories is the one that, in the opening track, comes across in every respect as an act of unconditional love, unguarded, ecstatic and genuinely moving, which the author crafts with astonishing delicacy and clarity. The storytelling impulse shifts toward a sparse but illuminating anecdotal mode with "Cypress", which, for instance, veils with a stern bitterness the innocence Brisa used to display so naturally back in the days of her breakthrough Takes, and which here remains intact beneath a veneer of disenchantment. Parish's touch is, as usual, lean and minimalist, letting the purity of the American singer's voice shine through, more controlled than ever before. No less telling is another episode, chosen among many possible ones, the farewell of "Carnation", with a tenderness of intonation that enchants despite the dark omens (à la Lisa Germano) of the grim ending already looming on the horizon.

Her debts to beloved P.J. Harvey, never denied, now become explicit and rather weighty, well beyond the choice of her lucky-charm producer, in raw, pulsing passages like "Fuck My Love" or "Black Mane", and in the gentle twilight of the masterpiece "Before I'm Gone". Roché had never before shown herself so grown-up and grounded in reality, and what's genuinely striking is that in this new, understated guise she comes across as more credible than she did as the dazzling siren amid the synth-pop phantasmagoria of the previous Invisible 1. Thus, from technicolor avant-pop talent, Brisa reinvents herself (in the manner of Nina Nastasia) as a superb interpreter of chiaroscuro, resolute and warm at once, thanks to the beautiful desert backdrops lit by electric flashes in the style of Giant Sand, set up by longtime friend Nick Zinner, guitarist of Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

The patience evoked in the title track is the maternal kind toward a partner with as many virtues as flaws, impossible to grasp from the adoring perspective of a sixteen-year-old condemned to confusion. The tenderness of her outlook today seals an affection that transcends words said or left unsaid in the past, and once again wins you over through its grace and spontaneity. Here and in "Holy Badness" Brisa avoids easy, reassuring hagiography, choosing not to silence the flaws, struggles and small personal dramas of a man who had clearly burned the candle at both ends. On the contrary, his imperfections are faced with grace, humanizing and smoothing over resentments, wounds and disappointments. "Father" thus manages to sound extraordinarily intense in the fragility it puts on display, without insincere devices or forced moments. "Blue Night", for instance, is a litany arranged with just organ and voice, and comes close to mysticism in the rigor and restraint it conveys. The bare-minimum synthetic beats of "Engine Off" don't get in the way of the clarity of the guitar work or the magic of her chant-like delivery, while the producer's unmistakable percussive signature adds further depth to this sonic structure, and the artist's assured steadiness commands admiration. With "Can't Control", introspection peeks through, following the same, far from narrow, formula that Roché would adopt for the second album of her roots-reclaiming project, released shortly after.

The album closes with "Trout Fishing Again", handing the floor to the uninvited guest and his monologue. No music, just a faint sound of traffic in the background and an exceedingly weary yet burning voice, reciting what sounds like a poem inspired by one of the counterculture manifestos that Roché's father breathed in fully, "Trout Fishing in America", by the kindred spirit Richard Brautigan.

Not all the old demos were handed over to Parish and Chant. Brisa kept a good deal of them for herself, drawing from all that material a proper diptych, coherent yet also discontinuous. If Father was an intense sonic memorial dedicated to a father figure worthy of a novel, no less sincere is the dedication of Low Fidelity, an understated yet luminous recollection of the years spent in close contact with nature alongside a mother no less eccentric. Recorded entirely on her own in the quiet of Northern California, the album opens with a spare but intimate voice-and-guitar performance, recorded live with no formal sweetening, which already says a lot about the new direction. The effect is cleansing rather than bleak, and it rewards Brisa's unmistakable, mesmerizing siren voice, by choice stripped down to the bone but none the worse for it. It's fair to read this sixth effort by Roché as the soundtrack to the days of her childhood, in the gentle imperfection of the bucolic setting the now forty-three-year-old grew up in, and it's no accident that, among the tags on Bandcamp, the name of her native Arcata appears alongside less expected labels like folk and soul. The lullabies improvised by her mother, absorbed and made her own at a tender age, come back to life in what can rightly be considered the necessary counterpart to its immediate predecessor, an album in this case dedicated to her mother herself: as grounded as the other was ethereal, with rustic, homespun artistry standing in for the incomparable electric skeletons shaped by Parish and his associate, yet without giving up a modest dose of eccentric quirks.

"California Man" says it plainly: the singer has rediscovered confidence and inspiration stripped of artifice, an intimacy that proves remarkably communicative, anything but narrow despite the solitude, not just in name, behind its making. Choruses and counter-choruses effectively offset the risks of gloom, despite the extremely limited resources at play. More than anything, Brisa shows she has regained an unexpected lightness and floats through it with absolute freedom, freed from the expressive armor that had evidently contaminated her creative vein with clichés, mannerisms or experiments as bold as they were ill-fitting. On "Secret Song" the immediacy is contagious and has the whiff of an instant classic, even if offered outside the most well-worn paths of North American folk tradition. In spirit, it's as if her first naive recordings, made when she wasn't even a teenager yet, had resurfaced, but filtered now through the sensibility and awareness of a mature artist, today a mother herself.

Frugality pays off, and considerably so, in a work that is also Roché's most Americana, a return to her roots through new models like Alela Diane, clearly sensed in the grooves of "Hey Little Boy". Behind the raspy singing of "Can You Run", behind the pursuit of polyphonies built out of nothing (as happens between brazenness and rapt introspection on "Daughter Of A Teacher"), there's no shortage of odd flourishes or that weirdness worthy of a third Casady sister, although this time the dominant note is one that doesn't shy away from touches of rustic enchantment. It's the flair of a latter-day Josephine Foster, the real key reference point here, no more and no less than Polly Jean Harvey was for "Father": just listen to how the brief voice-and-organ of "Tiger Song" sketches a subtle but sufficiently captivating idyll, with grace and nostalgia, or how on "Terribly Hard" the songwriter manages to be expressive with almost nothing, probing her countless facets through an offhand, even graceful, kind of shape-shifting. What comes out of it, beyond the modest ambitions of its packaging, is, in short, a strange yet thoroughly genuine collection – witness the heart-on-sleeve honesty of the piano miniature "Rings", minimal yet dense – which, right up to the farewell of "Babe", never betrays its pared-down, humble framework, a small wonder for the enchanting candor and serenity it conveys, a sense of peace finally won. That said, where the lovely Brisa might take us with her next release, we honestly won't dare to guess. This is not the final destination, of that we're sure, for an artist who has never stopped wandering between genres as much as between continents, in search of a home she will, in all likelihood, never find.

In 2023 Brisa Roché teams up with Nicolas Laureau, aka Don Niño, for a new project called RAD.

Pressed on an unusual and eye-catching transparent vinyl just 10” wide, Magenta. Cyan. White. is their debut LP after two years of activity.

The French-American singer's jazz style finds an ideal home in the hyper-psychedelic wall of sound arranged by Laureau, nurturing three melodies that captivate from the very first listen: “Magenta” is a lullaby in which Roché's chanting voice wraps around Laureau's stormy guitars, somewhere between post-shoegaze urges and a drone that's more noise than new age; “Cyan” is a post-punk assault, somewhere between Primal Scream and Royal Trux; “White” is the EP's masterpiece, an avalanche of ultra-black noise carrying Roché's disenchanted, ever-elegant voice into a stormy sea.

In the words of the people involved, RAD is: “A punk lullaby, an inner dialogue turned outward, a breathing guitar, New York meeting California meeting France with transgender transformation, FX, nature/mountains, urban landscapes and dreamlike atmospheres. Fire and ice.”

Contributions by Simone Coacci (“Takes”, “All Right Now”), Roberto Mandolini (“Magenta. Cyan. White.”)

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