LA FEMME - Mystère

Perhaps it went unnoticed amid this deafening din of releases, but the French music scene is nurturing (and gradually exporting) a new generation of talents that deserve serious attention. The global breakthrough of Christine & The Queens is undoubtedly the high point of this latest nouvelle vague, but behind the Nantes-born singer-songwriter there's a whole diverse ferment of bands ready to launch themselves onto a stage far bigger than the one confined within national borders. Among them, La Femme are perhaps the most mature and exportable project, and it's certainly no coincidence that they're the ones who've landed on the covers of the most prominent magazines across the Channel as they gear up to tour the Old Continent to present "Mystère", the second installment in the series, and above all the second bullseye of a still very young discography.

It's true that the collective formed in Biarritz in 2010 on the initiative of keyboardist Marlon Magnée and guitarist Sacha Got, who later relocated to Paris to find a definitive shape, was perhaps the worst-kept secret of the French scene. It had taken just "Psycho Tropical Berlin", released in 2013 after a couple of preparatory EPs, to fill the sextet's inbox with attention both at home (where they picked up the award for best debut of the year) and abroad, helped along by the réclame of a car commercial — obviously French — that used the verse of "Sur la Planche 2013" as its soundtrack.

If that was only the beginning, "Mystère" for its part can only stand as the manifesto of a band that is by nature brazen and overflowing, steeped in French tradition on an almost encyclopedic level while at the same time possessing an eclecticism and a surrealist streak that make it a case far more unique than rare: synth-pop, surf-rock, kraut, chanson and tons of psychedelia coexist peacefully within a tracklist as crowded as it is intense.

Then again, it takes real nerve, or maybe just a fair amount of cheek, to put out an album of seventeen tracks nowadays that aren't exactly lean (they often and willingly run past the five-minute mark) for a total of an hour and a quarter of music. Especially when putting yourself forward as a standard-bearer for the new national generation. And yet, in its lucid madness, this heterogeneous collection of songs works brilliantly, starting with the "acid" settings of "Sphynx" — not just the ouverture of the tracklist but also the lead single, accompanied by an equally lysergic video performed by the project's increasingly prominent female voice, Clémence Quélennec — which pair up with the rave of "S.S.D", geographically set in a restless, nocturnal Paris.

At the opposite extreme, literally speaking, lie the post-modern baroque flourishes of "Le vide est ton nouveau prénom" and "Psyzook", like taking Françoise Hardy and locking her up in Wonderland in Alice's place.

The motorik backbone propping up the synth-pop of "Mycose", the retro-futurist "Le Chemin" and the bittersweet yéyé nursery rhyme "Septembre" recall the Parisian sextet's other patron saints, the Stereolab of Laetitia Sadier, but the balance each track rests on is fragile and destined to be upended by the one that follows. It might be the space-punk of "Tatiana" or the captivating beat of "Exorciseur", so convincing it makes you think the band dug up an old notebook of Jacques Dutronc's sheet music in some dusty attic in the ninth arrondissement. The alternation of male and female voices chasing one another from one track to the next, meanwhile, helps amplify the disorienting effect of the whole.

The dusty mirages of "Al Warda" and the rarefied atmospheres of "Vagues", with its thirteen minutes, represent the other face of a psychedelia that also wears the hieratic — and synthetic — face of "Always In The Sun", the only English-language track and another undisputed peak of this gem-studded tracklist. A tracklist that closes on the synthetic midtempo "Couteau", an interstellar journey in the wake of Air.

At the end of this long run, amid one change of direction after another, what remains is a showcase of great songs. For this writer, one of the albums of the year.

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23/09/2016