Rover

Milan, Magnolia, 28/02/2013

He turned the evening into a novel, the way a romantic writer knows how to do. And it wasn't his stature or his hairstyle that made the biggest impression, or that allowed the sparse crowd at Circolo Magnolia — transformed for one night into a late-19th-century café — to pay such close attention to the storyteller. It was the poetry and the genuine nature of the man Timothée Régnier — the transalpine giant who travels the world under the name Rover — that enchanted the Milanese audience on a mild February evening, a far cry from the biting cold of previous shows.

Admitting curiosity for the live rendition of an album that's received such strongly positive reviews from the trade press seems only natural; feeling that curiosity grow, given that the live set was performed by just the duo of monsieur Rover (voice, guitar, keyboard) and monsieur Arnaud Gavini (drums, pads), is instead a duty.

The singer-songwriter surprise among the chansonniers of late 2012 delivered an excellent show, never overdoing the pacing or the delivery, drawing everything inward into the intimacy and emotion that soon emerged both on stage and throughout the venue.

Rover appears before the audience in the now-familiar "solid colour" look often seen in his web interviews: black leather jacket, slim-fit trousers, '80s-style boots; he's joined by young drummer Gavini, shyly polite as he takes in the modest crowd of listeners. The two open with an alternate version of "Queen of the Fools", reworked in an early-Deep Purple-style rock vein, with guitar run through a tasteful but tough overdrive, matching Rover's voice, which holds steady even as it's unsettled by the song's lyrical introspection; the audience greets the opener more warmly than one might have expected.

"Champagne" goes by without lingering too long, setting up a very soft, dreamy version of "Remember", with Gavini skilfully alternating electronic pads to create a hazy, slowed-down space in which Rover allows himself to stretch the notes, drawing them out just enough to give the idea of "memory" a far more romantic and intimate quality than on the album version. As the crowd keeps up its applause, the singer-songwriter moves to the keyboard, finally starting to loosen up, unbuttoning his coat and removing the scarf he'd tucked deep into the collar of his heavy jacket.

The Roland's keys sound out the first mournful notes of "Silver", well delivered by the chansonnier, who doesn't disappoint when he brings out the evening's first falsetto passages either, and which, towards the end, lead into the bonus track "Berenice", an excellent choice for a closing coda, coming across as far more enveloping and meaningful here than in isolated listening on record.

The much-awaited decadent romantic streak, steeped in mid-'70s folk, arrives with "Lou", as Rover sheds his rocker garb — the jacket now resting on the flight cases at the side of the stage — left with just his voice, bare and clear, and an arpeggiated guitar warmed by the velvety taps of Gavini's snare. It serves as the prologue to the single "Acqualast", the track that launched him in France and made him known across the rest of Europe: the artistic chemistry between the two musicians reaches its peak, with a total feel for handling pauses, entries and endings; Rover shows real confidence in his vocal abilities throughout the whole song, especially in the chorus and the ending, right before being met with the roar of a visibly satisfied and delighted crowd.

This is the centrepiece of the performance, in which Régnier gives himself completely over to his audience, laying bare the sadness that engulfs him as he sings the evening's second bonus track, "Father I Can't Explain": a heartfelt lament, a declarative blues in search of explanations left unspoken when there was still time to give them, in which Rover's sighs intertwine with the plaintive countermelodies of a "black and enslaved guitar" out of 1950s America.

There's a considerable leap through time when the two play "Late Night Love" and "Tonight" back to back, paying tribute to the '80s, an era the French chansonnier clearly holds dear. The keyboard melodies give way to a base guitar drenched in overdrive and heavy delay on "Late Night Love", where young Arnaud Gavini's abilities come fully to the fore: a gentle yet decisive touch, skilfully alternating between cymbals and toms, superbly capturing the emotional arc of every single passage of the song. Rover, meanwhile, is thoroughly warmed up by now: his voice is knowing and powerful, and with "Tonight" he underlines his own songwriting and artistic ambitions, keeping up a remarkable pace throughout the track, which closes with an enjoyable interplay of kick drum and falsetto.

As proof of the image, the presence and thus the reputation as a romantic giant that has built up around him, Rover bids farewell to the small Milanese stage with "Wedding Bells", performing it on keyboard, wrapping himself in a typically retro melancholy that digs deep into everyone's emotional core and brings unhealed wounds into contact with cascades of ethyl alcohol. The track is intense and leaves the audience with that sense of incompleteness so characteristic of romantic souls: Rover exits the stage, but the crowd is still hungry for more. No complaints, though, given the excellently performed hour of live music and the French artist's ability to convey sincerity and feeling in a show that, if anything, exceeded both expectations and the album's reviews.

Rome, Circolo degli Artisti, 03/02/2013

While we're traveling on a 105 bus packed with immigrant workers, it's hard to imagine we're on our way to see Rover. What's on our mind, more than his melodramatic songs, is Pier Paolo Pasolini's La Terra di Lavoro. Only when our gaze lands on a girl listening to music on her phone does our journey start to feel like an actual report.

So we start wondering what awaits us in the handful of hours we're about to spend with the Frenchman: there's been a lot of talk in recent months about Timothée Regnier, aka Rover. From one side of the ocean to the other and, as always happens, by extension over here too. His self-titled album has been described with flattering adjectives like shadowy and sensitive, winning over a substantial following both among the so-called indie crowd (orphaned by Interpol) and among palates more accustomed to other flavors. More refined ones, if you will. Bowie, Gainsbourg, Walker.

Since we're on a mission on behalf of OndaRock and not on a fishing trip, it's Vassilios Karagiannis's review that keeps buzzing in our head the most. Our colleague described Rover, back in November 2012, as "an unlikely cross between Antony and Gérard Depardieu". Pretty gutsy, we think to ourselves. And yet our first impression is rather deflating.

Aside from the notoriously dubious acoustics that have by now become a trademark of Circolo degli Artisti, the lineup on stage is reduced to just two figures. Timothée, imposing and iconic like Meat Loaf on the 1977 "Bat Out Of Hell" tour, and a drummer to his right. Standing in the second row, we realize in an instant that the latter has been amplified so much that we have to step back a few rows to get anything resembling a bearable listening experience. Clearly, this isn't Magnolia in Milan.

The rest of "Rover"'s distinctive sound is left entirely to the former. Regnier splits his time almost evenly between his trusty Rickenbacker ("It's really gorgeous!", he'll confess beaming a little later), a keyboard set up in the background, and of course the microphone at center stage. And here's where things go south, as the album's excellent premise is almost completely wiped out: the interplay of instruments and attitudes, underpinned by crystalline, engaging songwriting that on record creates a strange and tender mixture, both dense and dreamlike at once, simply fails to materialize.

So, while even the adoptive Sanremo resident Antony Hegarty comes across, in any live setting, as an alien dropped among us from who knows where, capable of expressing himself like few other human beings ever have, Timothée Regnier would merely like to. Or rather, "je piacerebbe!" — seeing as we're in Rome. In practice, keeping a shred of intellectual honesty, the thirty-three-year-old French chansonnier comes across like a back-and-forth between Morrissey and Glen Danzig, between Elvis Presley and Matthew Bellamy. We shudder. And we run through our therapist's phone number in our head.

Beyond the music, even the image becomes rather muddled. So we start to lose sight of why we're even here, except to report that Rover live bears little (very little, hard to pin down at all) resemblance to the Rover on record. It even seems pointless to single out which song came off better or worse than on the widely praised self-titled album, since none of them would have much in common anyway with the memory you carry home from your listening sessions.

And yet, in the accounts of colleagues who had seen him in an acoustic setting (hopefully not on YouTube), the satisfaction seemed to have been complete. "The choice to play as a duo came down to logistics and budget, no point dancing around it," the songwriter tells us in the exchange he grants us. "When it came to deciding which instrument could best capture the album's mood, I preferred drums, to give the songs more solidity. My way of communicating, after all, lies in being sincere and still creating an emotional, verbal thread between me — as I am on and off stage — and the audience." If you say so.

The venue doesn't hold more than a hundred people, giving off the odd — and honestly a bit irritating — feeling of one of those gigs that, if you're truly-truly hipster, you simply can't miss. So you run into familiar and less-familiar faces from the Roman scene, interspersed with the odd famous face that hadn't set foot in Circolo in at least five months. All ready to feign keen interest, innate aplomb, and undying verve while good-naturedly commenting on the performance — which was in fact rewarded with plenty of applause.

Too bad the more folkloric hints of the Thin White Duke found in "Queen Of The Fools", for instance, must have been left behind at Fiumicino airport with the luggage, leaving the track adrift in a pompous, reverb-drenched sludge that would have given even Freddie Mercury pause. And he knew a thing or two about bombast.

"I'd like to see my idea confirmed, that I can be appreciated by different kinds of people in different kinds of situations," handsome Timothée tells us afterward. "Can you tell me the average age of the people who were in the room today?" We answer that there were a lot of thirty-somethings and university students, but few teenagers and very few adults. "That's a real shame, concerts should be a communal experience, not dictated by preconceptions or restrictions. These days there's not even a shred of willingness to take risks left." We agree, but point out to him that, beyond the populism of John Lennon's "Imagine", music is a bit like politics, and in the end you also have to pick a side.

For a moment we're afraid he might start talking about Beppe Grillo too, but our silent prayers to ward off that drama are answered: "I definitely have a singer-songwriter approach, I think, but I'm also a huge fan of the Beatles and Brian Wilson, but not only them. I even listen to Joy Division. These are periods of my life tied to pop music, all equally fascinating and very creative and intense."

We try asking how he'd define his project, then, but to no avail. We venture a "Revivalist?" à-la Simon Reynolds to nudge him along, but he just smiles at us, serene and good-natured, repeating once more: "I really don't know." The show we witnessed closes with Timothée waving goodbye to everyone from the stage, a conspicuous scarf wrapped around his neck to protect his monolithic vocal cords; a former colleague from a print magazine sardonically nicknames him Meat Loaf, and a circle seems to close. All that's left for us is to head home thinking about how much the innate refinement of the lyrics, and the undeniable craft honed over time and miles on the road with The New Government, saved this evening from total collapse. While we wait to see him again, perhaps in one of his much-praised acoustic sets, Mott The Hoople keep us company on a now-empty 105 bus with "Sucker" — need we say more?

Photo contributions by Stefano Ferreri (Milan) and Franz Bungaro (Rome)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google