Fievel Is Glauque conjure up visions of the busiest forest in the world, dense with hopping rabbits, canoes gliding down the river, and elvish creatures serenading you from thickets and trees. Or perhaps it’s a traffic jam in heaven—a pastel tangle of woodwinds, guitar, drums, keys, synths, and vocals as tickly as wind rushing past your ears. The duo’s latest, Rong Weicknes, is their prettiest, poppiest rush-hour prog-jazz clusterfuck yet.
Performed by an octet, this album expands FIG’s style into full-blown hyper-colored odysseys. Their cultishly adored debut, God’s Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess, was recorded entirely on mono cassette, lending it a charmingly stuffy, attic-dusty atmosphere. The follow-up, Flaming Swords, was done in a single night, with many tracks zipping by in two minutes or less. Rong Weicknes is the result of Zach Phillips, Ma Clément, and their bandmates taking more time. Last summer, they slipped away to a bucolic farm and studio in the Catskills for a week, where the group deployed a technique Phillips calls “live in triplicate.” They laid three varying live takes and then, in meticulous post-production sessions, subtracted bits to land on a final collage of the performances.
The idea that they subtracted anything is hard to believe, because the finished product still often sounds like multiple jam sessions superimposed, a buzzing hive of harmonized insanity. The way it’s mixed feels almost like they’re trying to prevent listeners from extricating and discerning the components—is that keening texture a viola? Are those two different woodwind instruments, or just one doubled in octave? There’s a black midi madness to tunes like “Kayfabe,” which ramps up to a doomsday climax of horns, drums, piano, Clément stretching out until she disappears in the flood. “Dark Dancing” is an overgrown garden of flute, percussion, and warbly sitar. Clément’s voice gets choppy, a breathless stream of grunted ad-libs. Yet the eclectic clutter is strangely danceable, like a disco ball whose every tiny mirror flashes a different shade of neon.
What keeps the album from getting exhausting is the melodic lightness. FIG deftly combine technical freakouts and avant intricacy with airy freshness. It’s a jazzy version of middle-of-the-road ’70s pop like the Carpenters, with a flurry of time signature and tempo shifts and extreme rhythmic flexibility. Highlight “As Above So Below” is cardiac arrest-inducing yet irresistible, leavening the blitz of instruments with a topline that feels like you’re frolicking in the sun. Brief freakouts like the sax tornadoes on “It’s So Easy” are over almost instantly. It’s a Flip-O-Rama between freeform moments when the jazz crew starts blowing wild and Disney-fairytale sweetness.
The guide through this disorienting hedge maze is Clément, a cross between Flora Purim, Sue Tompkins, and an opaque poetry generator. Her dulcet vocals don’t reach the frilly gibberish of a jazz singer like Urszula Dudziak, but the lyrics can feel just as scatterbrained. Singing about relationships gone awry and passing out with the TV blaring down the hall, she mirrors every yank and tumble of the instrumentation, whizzing from grass-soft whispers to flaming roars. The jittery intensity in her voice makes her sound like she’s possessed by crazed visions but also lost in reverie. Production tricks make things even more agile. Clément’s voice is mutated with reverb, multi-tracking, and by sometimes forcing her doubled voice slightly out of sync, like a shimmering after-image. The polyphony of a single voice on “Kayfabe” makes it sound like she’s conspiratorially whispering with herself.
Since the start, the FIG project has felt thrillingly nonsensical, esoteric, borderline bewitched. There’s lore behind every name—“Fievel Is Glauque” fuses the iconic cartoon rodent Fievel Mousekewitz with the French word for dull bluish-green, or something waxy or sinister. The title “As Above So Below” comes from the Emerald Tablet, a ninth century Hermetic text known as a foundational document of alchemy. Its music video is even more bizarre yet strangely right: Alone and prancing around a park in a yellow sundress, Clément starts vacuuming the grass and trees like she’s in her living room. This surreal mischief oozes into the lyrics, which convey more through how they sound than by what they say. The thesis behind this project, as cribbed from playwright Richard Foreman’s City Archives and sampled in the interlude “Would You Rather?,” is this question: “Would you rather have an explanation or an image?” She could probably annotate every cryptic line with backstory, but it works better without explanation. Instead, the listener is kept blissfully in the dark, bombarded by shards of sense that, like nervous birds, fly away before you can see them clearly.
At times, the album can feel so layered that it makes you yearn for the placid groove-glaze of earlier tunes like “Rain Down.” Even the most soothing songs, like “Toute Suite,” which could soundtrack a sunset-watching date in 1960s Santa Monica, never let up on the assembly line of instruments vying for attention. In an interview, Phillips and Clément spoke about how her vocals sound the most electric after numerous takes, when she becomes so fatigued that she loses her self-consciousness and “let[s] the emotion take power.” This music can have that effect on the listener, avalanching your ears with sound until every instrumental twist and vocal curlicue flashes alive in your strained brain. “My Oubliette” slows and speeds, spasming through horn freakouts and chaotic piano lines. If most of the album already sounds like a buzzing hive, this is when the queen bee dies and it’s insect anarchy. Loopiest of the lot may be the closer, “Haut Contre Bas,” which gathers everyone together for a glorious last blast. Everything’s in French, a soft, sibilant language, so the vocals sound even more cursive and swirly. Clément barrel-rolls across the mix, her voice multiplying, echoing over and intertwining with the band. Eight people are playing but it sounds like one brain.
