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Odes for Cruelty
Kyo: Le Chemin
I'm not going to become obsessed by French rock music. I really don't have the time. I'm trying to help plan a wedding, and reduce the material overhead of my life by half, and cope with the company I work for being acquired for the second time in twelve months. I've got a long list of house projects, and over the winter I want to learn to roll a kayak, and I haven't written a song since Valentine's Day. I should take another Japanese class. I've never seen Barbados. Besides, French rock sucks. Jean Michel Jarre hardly counts, and I can easily live without Autour de Lucie and aren't they Canadian anyway?
But there I was in record stores in Paris, because I was in Paris and there are record stores there. And I might as well listen to whatever they have on listening stations. Especially the ones that Belle heard first and thought I might like. I think she picked out three, one of them with reservations, and I agreed with her about all three, including the reservations, which left me with two. Weeks after returning, I'm still listening to both records and still haven't bothered finding out a single additional fact about either band, which is both a good reflection on her judgment and offers some hope that the potential obsession has been successfully contained.
On the cover, Kyo look like a fairly painfully generic four-piece, like Deep Blue Something fancying themselves Alice in Chains. The credits reveal that they do only some of their own programming and use a session bassist, which doesn't suggest much grunge authenticity. According to Babelfish, their first album was good enough to "install them on the scene of the pop Frenchwoman", which sounds like it might be more fun for them than for the Frenchwoman, or me. Le Chemin appears to be their second album. "Le Chemin" means "The Way".
Kyo do, however, turn out to have a way. It involves, for the most part, lots of big guitars, layers of carefully groomed sample textures, crashing toy-industrial rhythms, Benoit Poher's plaintive voice, and production values impeccable enough to recontextualize their facial hair. In action, they sound more like Deep Blue Something channeling Depeche Mode via Marilyn Manson, or the Goo Goo Dolls after a week of cursory Sisters of Mercy lessons. This goth-lite combination hasn't been much in fashion in the US in a while, and I have no idea whether it's any more popular in France.
But it makes me pretty happy. "Le Chemin" shoots muttery static-drums and florid synth-piano glissades through Michael Penn-esque quasi-cello whirs, and Poher duets airily with Dutch singer Sita. Poher picks his way diffidently through the clipped semi-rap verses of "Je Cours", but the choruses revert to comfortably sweeping power-chord bluster. "Dernière Danse" turns wistful, à la the Verve Pipe or maybe K's Choice, and disassembles and reassembles gracefully. "Tout Envoyer en l'Air" fires up the buzzsaw guitars and stutter-slam drum cadences, and reminds me pleasantly of a more gadgety Idlewild or a bubblier Kent. "Chaque Seconde" lists towards power-ballad, sighing into dreamy falsetto in the choruses, but the lurching "Comment Te Dire" returns to overdriven guitar crunch. "Je Saigne Encore" is a measured lullaby on the order of a re-energized Travis, but "Je Te Vends Mon åme" grumbles and gnashes under its beat-box loops, and "Pardonné" poses boy-band strut over quietly pinging guitars. The faintly early-Stereophonics-ish "Sur Nos Lèvres" is either the album's least mannered song or its most, depending on whether you key more on the relative absence of production tricks from the wiry guitar lines or the pervasive effeteness of the lead vocal and the syrupy glow of the harmonies. "Tout Reste à Faire", the finale, tries to edge into sultry twang, which isn't my idea of Kyo's strength and makes for a less cathartic conclusion than the album seemed otherwise to be headed towards, but downbeat endings are the product of the same twinges of pretension as the Photoshopped flood water on the cover and the haircuts. And despite the damage it reliably incurs, I basically prefer pretension to its absence. Better to be something than to want to be something, if you have the chance, but if you don't want, how will you tell what's a chance and what isn't?
Indochine: Paradize
But if Kyo aren't quite pretentious enough, the other French band I brought home might be. For all I know there's a vast universe of French musical factions and Kyo and Indochine champion adamantly orthogonal causes, but in my haplessly oversimplified version Indochine are essentially Kyo re-rendered as a robo-anime cartoon. Hack off most of Kyo's amiable guitar-pop foundation and focus the style entirely on its platform-stompy neo-dark-New-Wave flair, like Gene Loves Jezebel via Orgy and The Matrix, and maybe you'll be able to reconstruct the transformation. "Paradize" sounds like a "People Are People" remake in which the people are replicants. "Electrastar", with delicate little hooks glittering out of the spooky gloom, could be what you'd get by boiling the irony off of a Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine anthem and then dredging it in tar. "Punker" is robo-punk like the Dead Milkmen reanimated by the KLF. "Mao Boy!" may be the lost grand-anthem link between "West End Girls", "Don't You (Forget About Me)", "Shake the Disease" and "Only Happy When It Rains". "J'ai Demandé à la Lune" lapses into cabaret hauteur (and some odd Crash Test Dummies hum), but "Dunkerque" is a jubilant neo-goth rumble like the Jesus and Mary Chain blurring Siouxsie and the Banshees, and "Like a Monster" shamelessly invokes Liquidizer-era Jesus Jones.
Paradize is long enough for two albums, and kind of half-restarts in the middle with the extravagantly over-orchestrated "Le Grand Secret". Melissa Auf Der Maur contributes a guest vocal, and the song builds from tolling electric piano into synth-string surges and eventually fuzzed guitar spasms before settling into a circumspect decrescendo and heartbeat fade-out. "La Nuit des Fées" clashes keyboard bleats seemingly swiped from Foreigner's "Cold as Ice" against booming drums and washes of indistinct guitar. "Marilyn" sounds like an Icehouse meditation bursting into clattering Sigue Sigue Sputnik reel. "Le Manoir" casts back to New Order and Gardening by Moonlight. "Popstitute" is a fabulously stupid title, and lives up to it with a song like Love and Rockets trying to play a Portuguese square-dance. "Dark" is painted bleak, like "Love Will Tear Us Apart" revised to "Love Will Make Us Wear Too Much Eyeliner". "Comateen 1" reprises just about every allusion made elsewhere, before finishing off with a shameless "O Superman" vocoder verse. And after all this, I'm actually pretty surprised that Indochine don't have the slightest idea how to end an album in character either. "Un Signe en Hiver" is a Jean Louis Murat cover, rendered creakily as bad piano over bad drum-machine sputter, like Casio-preset piano-bar chanson. Sometimes you can learn something about yourself by putting on somebody else's costume, even when there's less to it than your own. But that isn't necessarily an excuse for leaving the house half-dressed.
Dir en grey: VULGAR
I don't know how the rest of the neo-goth scene is doing in France, if indeed there's more of it. But it's definitely doing fine in Japan, where they've renamed it Visual Kei and elaborated on its rococo glower with such exuberance that at this point they probably have a better claim on it than the dour English art-school post-punks that invented it the first time around. The key insights are that there's hardly anything that couldn't be more something somehow, and when it seems like you've taken two things to their final possible extremes you can always smash one up and glue the pieces to the outside of the other. Thus Visual Kei ends up as a tornadoed mash of jagged punk, twitchy math-rock, operatic affect, blistering thrash-metal and every uncomfortable dress-up style from Kiss and Prince back to the Italian bankers' kids Machiavelli used to beat up in middle school. To approximate this in Western bands you'd have to convince Queensrÿche circa Rage for Order to play at Emperor's speed with early Manic Street Preachers' abandon, Nightwish's expansiveness, Ronnie James Dio and Meat Loaf arguing over the parameters of quiet proportion, and Gwar's staging. I'd have told you that Gackt was my personal exemplar of the style, but his new album isn't due until next month, and in the meantime I've come across this new one by Dir en grey. Somehow, a while ago, I'd decided that I didn't need to buy any Dir en grey albums. And then I forgot that.
Forgetting is good. VULGAR is easily the most bracing thing I've heard in a year when "bracing" hasn't often been the chief virtue of music I've liked. The first song spots you a placidly ominous fifteen seconds before Kyo lets out his first grotesque bellow. After that serenity has no place. The drumming is restlessly brutal, as if the band holds a permanent grudge against anybody who ever tried to stand still for a minute at a time, and the band's own appallingly overbearing production manages to keep the beats heavily distinct at a speed where many death-metal bands would be content to let them rot into lumpy sludge. Guitarists Die and Kaoru seem blissfully aware that there are parts of the world where Fugazi and Don Caballero are considered to play a qualitatively different sort of music from Slayer and Dream Theater, and from Nine Inch Nails and Killing Joke (never mind the internal distinctions), and are thus about equally apt to grind into geometric dissonance, surging half-step hooks, or the kind of noise you might get out of Steve Vai by dragging him behind an old black Firebird. Toshiya's bass isn't captured with quite the timbral detail Peter Collins lavished on Eddie Jackson on Queensrÿche's Empire, but it's muscular enough to make a lot of nominally stationary objects in my house vibrate. And Kyo, the singer, has one of those halfway shrill Japanese voices that sound like he's perpetually singing out of the middle of a yawn voluminous enough to swallow a wolverine, except when he sounds like he's in the process of swallowing the wolverine, and the wolverine isn't enjoying the experience. The combined effect is something like old Thought Industry crossed with Poison, or possibly Killing Joke hijacked by Hypocrisy, and the fact that Kyo is mostly singing in Japanese adds an extra crazed-rant dimension for Japanese-ignorant audiences, which at least in real-time still includes me. (And a brief inspection of the written lyrics of "Marmalade Chainsaw", as a randomly selected track, suggests that translation isn't really going to make much difference.) I'm grimly certain that most listeners perplexed by other extreme musics like death metal and industrial noise are going to find this no more accommodating, and probably the fans of most current Western extremes will balk at the preening theatricality. We don't combine manic violence and ebullient fun this way, at the moment. We have Marilyn Manson and Matrix sequels, and wonder why cool seems so dull.
HIM: Love Metal
Maybe there's a little more crossover hope for Finnish quintet HIM. If Evanescence can have hits with what amounts to a watered-down version of Nightwish, then surely a slightly more glam Scandinavian version of Marilyn Manson with real melodies and the occasional sly Euro-metal flourish could be huge here, right? If it isn't, I'm not sure we'd be proud of the real reasons. Marilyn Manson threatens some people, but his stage character is an asexual mutant, a retreating defiance rather than an attacking one, and his material is largely grounded in the culture he's purporting to stand apart from. He is an icon of I Am Different, but as his lucid scene in Bowling for Columbine demonstrates better than his own songs, the content of his difference is mostly, circularly, the fact of it. Manson's make-up makes the graphic point that to accept him as he is, you have to accept that he's quite apparently different. This is more urgently true of lots of kids who don't look different, so wearing a Marilyn Manson T-shirt becomes a simplified cipher for Manson's more elaborate costume.
HIM, on the other hand (or HER, as they seem doomed to be known in the US in deference to June of 44 drummer Doug Scharin's side-project HiM), are much more subtly seditious. "Love Metal" is what they call their own little mini-genre, and their talisman, the heartagram, is a circled pentagram in which the top two points have been rounded off to turn it into a triangle-crossed heart. Valo, the singer, wears enough make-up to get attention, but not enough to turn it into a costume, and the combination of his satyric presence and the shaggy, Megadeth-like demeanor of the rest of the band isn't as easy to reduce to social homily. Loving HIM isn't just buying a prefab declaration of your uniqueness, it risks endorsing some odd agenda of their own, and I don't think that will work here. Where Manson is asexual, Valo is a romantic, and although his material mostly deals with love in the abstract, this makes it potentially effeminate by omission, and whatever can be claimed for the current state of ambiguous-sexual-preference tolerance in the American Empire on the basis of discrimination laws and the popularity of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, you'll notice that there are still no homosexuals in male team sports, and only one gay man in heavy metal.
But maybe I'm underestimating people. Maybe we're farther along in music than we are in sports (or maybe one offhand "girl" reference per album is actually enough). Or maybe, more mundanely, if HIM can't make it here it's only because the idea of Andrew Eldritch falling in love and making a happy Sisters of Mercy record, which is pretty much what HIM sounds like, doesn't please other people as much as it pleases me. But other people suck, we knew that, and Love Metal might well be my favorite goth-metal album since Vision Thing. "Buried Alive by Love" rattles along on guitar-buzz verses before soaring into wistful "If I should die before I wake" / "If I should wake before I die" crooning. "Funeral of Hearts" is alternately lacy and crushing. "Beyond Redemption" recalls "Rainbow in the Dark" and maybe Night Ranger before that. "Sweet Pandemonium" fills in the next step in the unlikely series from "Iron Man" to "This Corrosion" to "November Rain". "Soul on Fire" brandishes its Ministry/NIN/Manson lineage in hammering choruses, and "The Sacrament" could be HIM's version of Evanescence's gauzy shimmer through blacklit fog, but "This Fortress of Tears" knows its old Black Sabbath and new Tori Amos better. "Circle of Fear" sounds more than a little like an Eldritch setting for Chris Isaak (presumably not a coincidence, given HIM's notorious cover of "Wicked Game"). "Endless Dark" flutters warmly under all its guitar bombast. And HIM do know how to end an album: a grand eight-minute 3/4 power-metal ballad-waltz swooping from glassy Rhodes hush to the kind of redemptively heartbroken chorus you can only sing properly if you're making distractedly swaying orchestra-conductor hand-motions, preferably while wearing a shirt with frilly cuffs. "I walk through the gardens of dying light", Valo sighs, "and cross all the rivers deep and dark as the night". This used to be heavy metal's country. The heartagram may be a preposterous symbol, but unlike the thoroughly co-opted iconography from which it was cheerfully derived, it's also a real symbol, a mark of human haunting and a banner of hearts instead of fists. We need more banners. I know this pageantry is ludicrous, of course, but I also know that the difference between majesty and absurdity is in how you listen. And so I listen in the constant intractable hope that this majestic music, willing to be transfixed by its own indefensible faiths, is what we're really afraid to admit we believe.
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