Le Grand Couturier is the eponymous second album from Jean-François Riffaud (steel guitar, voice, sampler), Rachel Langlais (keyboards, voice), and Clément Vercelletto (percussion, synths), a trio who know their way round the French experimental scene and have taken a tropical aesthetic into the realm of musique concrète.
The album kicks off with the rumble-tumble of ‘Fanta Cinq’ which has the steel guitar ducking and diving around drums that hark back to the booming toms and staccato rimshots of big band leaders like Gene Krupa or Buddy Rich.
‘I Ku’u Wa Li’i Li’I’ (‘in my little time’) is a more conventional slide round the dancefloor of a Tiki bar from the 1950s when Tiki culture was all the rage in America. It sways and shimmies like a cocktail umbrella moving in a sea of ice cubes. ‘Maneki Neko’ (rough translation is ‘beckoning cat’, the figurine with the moving paw) is the kind of slow moving, underwater ballad that you would listen to from your banquette in a club called the Paradise Lounge while sipping a Zombie or a Mai Tai, and Langlais’ voice is replete with lush echo. There is a similar vibe on ‘Adventures in Paradise’ which takes the steel guitar cliché and scuffs it up with layers of grating noise, like finding a Hawaiian radio station drifting in and out of a long wave transmission.
‘I One Huna Ka Pahu’ is hard percussive track that has the feel of a ritual dance by a fire pit and ‘Hula Kong has drums and percussion that bounce around a syrupy guitar line that utilises the steel slide to send notes into the stratosphere while the keyboard weaves sweet melodies throughout. ‘Monette’ and ‘L’isle’ finish off the album with moody panache with the latter a casually haunted sunset that could also be the world on fire.
Take as a whole Le Grand Couturier is a Hawaiian fever dream, a wonderful slice of Tikitronica that takes some established sonic tropes and flips them on their head. This is a Tiki bar run by Tom Waits in the basement of One-Eyed Jacks from Twin Peaks. It’s pleasing and disquieting in equal measure and that uncanny valley experience made me love it all the more.
The album is released on the Un je-ne-sais-quoi label, a fascinating outfit that has truly eclectic releases including drummer Valentina Magaletti’s Fragile Battery played on a ceramic drum kit, the old school French rap of Saucisse Cocktail on Musique Savantes, and Funken’s Daniel Dan La Nuit the soundtrack to a children’s book about a squid’s aquatic odyssey which I reviewed for Joyzine last year.
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Review by Paul F Cook
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