It should sound like it weighs enough to destroy if not handled carefully. The artist themselves presents a few vignettes as context, the first of which is London legend Guy Stevens swinging chairs around the studio as The Clash record the song “The Card Cheat” twice—one track over the other—in an attempt to manually double-track the sound, building something unruly and grand. The second is the sound of 60s band White Noise’s influential psych-pop/sound collage album An Electric Storm, which meticulously pieces together surreal sound effects on tape to take the shape of a pop song.
While London Calling and An Electric Storm are far from “difficult” listens, the fact that Zach Phillips—bandleader of Brooklyn/Brussels jazz-pop outfit Fievel is Glauque—cited those two examples to demonstrate how they made their second full-length album feels specific and intentional. The miracle is that Rong Weicknes, the album in question, feels grand without demanding its listener know or investigate what it’s referencing. While other indie maximalists build museum pieces to be talked about as much as they’re listened to (which certainly have their place), Fievel is Glauque operate in purely ephemeral territory. To confine movement or thought to a single channel appears to be the antithesis of their mission.
The band, centered around the New York-based Phillips and Belgium-based vocalist Ma Clément, took an intense approach in their recording process with eight other musicians, following Strummer/Jones and Co. by layering two straight-forward takes of each song before adding an improvisatory take on top of it. This method of recording can sound dubious if you’ve been charmed by the band before. With the two primary members having met by accident, everything about their partnership up to this point has thrived on spontaneity—after all, this is their first project where they’ve had longer than 24 hours to record. As such, their first collection of songs, God’s Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess, and their official debut, 2022’s Flaming Swords, are stuffed to the brim with songs that rarely breach the two-minute mark, but sparkle with personality even in their bare bones form.
By comparison, you’d expect a more intentional process to weigh down or clutter the formula. Yet, what the band does instead is perfect a balancing act, taking advantage of the broader canvas they have to work with, only expanding the distinct lane Fievel is Glauque has carved out for itself. A delightfully anachronistic quality shines throughout in its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, teasing out quirks which would be smoothed over in the tradition of lounge-friendly jazz-pop they seek to embellish and update. The opening one-two punch of “Hover” and lead single “As Above, So Below” feel emblematic of this effect, never feeling stuffy or like Phillips and Clément are looking over their shoulder and waiting for recognition to flash in your eyes. It’s the sound of music fanatics mashing together textures or influences that thrill them—creating a refreshing, contagious sense of joy.
The former song opens the record with a blast of synths which quickly give way to quieter melodies played on analog instruments, setting up the conceit of the song as if to prepare you for the way it will continue to wobble between each mode. Yet, for just how dense the instrumentation is, each destabilizing move feels like a stepping stone to build momentum; in that given song, it crescendos in a flurry of cymbals crashing and bows striking stringed instruments—as if to show that even sheer chaos has directionality baked in. By the time “As Above, So Below” kicks into full gear—turning up the playfulness without eschewing the complexity—it sounds like a room flooded with natural light, presenting an open space for Clément to spout existential concerns as the song builds up to an unexpected, crackling guitar solo: “Think about it / We’re all barely real, our ideas / Are only magical.”
Though the arrangements usually succeed at focusing your attention despite all of the elements jam-packed into any given second of the tracklist, Clément’s specific vocal quality is worth lauding, serving as the project’s grounding force. A point of comparison that comes to mind is Broadcast’s Trish Keenan—a straight-forward alto tinged with sweetness even when it floats above a daring collision of sound made by the rest of the band. Again, the arrangements and melodies are brilliantly executed, but Clément’s voice is a crucial instrument in the mix, tethering the fantastical swirl to solid ground.
With that guiding element, it allows the listener to revisit and pick out different nuances. The title track sounds like an uptempo jazz standard dipped in neon, backed by a barrage of keys, saxophone and bass that seem poised to prevent it from entering showtunes territory. Yet, by the end, it’s hard to identify what instruments are making a given sound—until the sax rips into a solo and the familiarity of a more conventional jazz workout returns. It’s as if subversion is deployed and suspended with the flip of a switch and it’s up to the more observant listener to unspool that thread, if they so wish.
In a similar vein, take “It’s So Easy,” which has the bones of a bossa nova song but is supplemented with warbling woodwinds as Clément insists that it’s “hard to seek what is unknown / It makes me kind of queasy.” In what is perhaps an effort to reflect the soul-searching lyrical content, these songs intrinsically rely on a constant state of motion—kinetic to the point of dizziness, as they throw you between time signatures, between realms of genre. A collective of musicians teeters on the edge of collapse, but the push and pull drive the end product. The sweetness of a track like “My Ouibette” can morph into something more sinister as it progresses, letting one piece slip before the double-time chorus explodes and noises erupt like they’re stabbing at you. Even if they’re building with familiar materials, it’s the way they’re torn apart and reconstructed that makes it feel like Fievel is Glauque is uninterested in recreating the past. Instead, on Rong Weicknes, they’ve made something with a pulse, contemporary and alive.
Even as the recording has become less lo-fi and embraced a lushness not present on prior releases, the crackle of the chemistry they’d landed on with their earlier release has not diminished. A different experimental artist of a different time and place called Fievel is Glauque’s rest state “a state of emergency, that’s where I want to be.” In a precarious world, we take comfort in that which staggers as we do. Anarchy can sing, and the result arrives light as air.
Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.
