FEU THERESE - Feu Therese

I Fly Pan Am were perhaps the most eccentric of the Canadian bands that coalesced around the Constellation label, bands more or less rightly lumped into the all-encompassing post-rock catch-all. With the partial exception of their first, self-titled record, they have in fact always followed their own artistic paths, quite far removed from those of the many offshoots of the Godspeed You! Black Emperor collective, with whom - beyond the differing stylistic approach - there have been very few points of contact, even in terms of collaborations and mutual cross-pollination.

While the Fly Pan Am project has been dormant since the impetuous, bizarre avant-noise fresco of "N'Ecoutez Pas", the band's guitarist, Jonathan Parant, now turns up with a new artistic venture, Feu Thérèse, in which he's joined by other musicians, among them bassist and sound manipulator Alexandre St-Onge (already active in Et Sans and Shalabi Effect). The result is an oblique avant-rock, with an oxymoronic vintage feel, growing out of the same sonic reworkings typical of Fly Pan Am to give life to a complex stratification of soundscapes, by turns improvised and meticulously constructed, driven by a somewhat narcissistic eccentricity that often spills over into unsettling dissonance.

The influences at play in this record are nonetheless manifold: from the deviant psychedelia of the 60s to contorted wave traces, from vaguely free-jazz intuitions to an overt tribute, both conceptual and aesthetic, to the memory of avant-garde composer Luc Ferrari, to whom the album is dedicated. It's no coincidence that the opening track is "Ferrari En Feu", a song that's enough to immediately clarify the band's sonic signature, its six minutes split evenly between iterative synth sketches and a steady rhythmic base, over which underlying psychedelic drifts and guitar improvisations collide. From this, "Mademoiselle Gentleman" picks up and pushes things to excess, with its bare bass lines and thunderous guitars, propped up by a lopsided drumming and smeared by the sudden eruption of synth, by turns abrasive and more fluid, almost sketching nostalgic arabesques in a space-rock vein.

"Tu N'Avais Qu'Une Oreille", a relatively calmer track and the only one to feature hints of vocals, instead opens with rhythmic cadences close to post-rock sonic deconstructions, before twisting in on itself in a controlled explosion of guitars over the now-familiar acidic, deliberately unkempt base. The two remaining compositions further sharpen the band's experimental tendencies: "L'Homme Avec Couer Avec Elle" opens with a synthetic vortex pounded by a harsh, relentless rhythm, which dissolves, in the track's second half, into a bizarre jazzy improvisation, amid saxophones and screeching guitars.

Finally, the lengthy "Ce N'est Pas Les Jardins Du Luxembourg" (twelve minutes) closes the record, alternating prolonged organ drones, electronic blips and vaguely Eastern-tinged atmospheres.

Taken as a whole, the record undoubtedly shows a good level of quality, never feeling predictable, as is the case with pretty much every release on the excellent Constellation. In its forty minutes there are plenty of ideas, perhaps even too many; it's a shame, though, that the whirling, studied compositional chaos often ends up creating a certain disorientation, with the band (true to the same "self-sabotaging" logic found in late-period Fly Pan Am) at times curling back in on itself, getting somewhat lost among the many elements of its very personal, yet equally self-referential, take on this kind of jazz-stained, oddball space-rock.

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01/06/2006