For a brief pocket of time in the beginning of the 2010s, spoken-word poetry was surprisingly prevalent in music. Spanning Jamie xx’s remixes of Gil Scott-Heron, to Brian Eno and the poet Rick Holland’s Drums Between the Bells, and the lowbrow masterpiece of Paris Hilton’s “Drunk Text,” this little bumper crop did not go unnoticed: The Guardian clunkily called the shared musical space “poetronica.” While reading poetry over sweet-toned beats always felt kitschy, there is something undeniable linking the two forms: As the poet Jodi Ann Bickley has said, the forms are exceptional at creating a sense of “place,” and both inherently are dictated by a primordial sense of rhythm.
One of the most successful and captivating practitioners of spoken-word electronic has been Marie Davidson, one half of the Montreal coldwave duo Essaie Pas. Her two previous solo releases (Perte D'Identité and Un Autre Voyage) mingled gothic ambient music, poetic repetitions, and analog synthpop to great success. Her work has never felt campy, but is darkly rendered, probing, and redolent of Lizzy Mercier Descloux. In her third solo release, Adieux Au Dancefloor, Davidson presents a project that indicates exciting and near-exponential growth in her ability as a writer and producer.
The project started to gestate last year, after Davidson returned to Montreal from Berlin, having completed a recent European tour with Essaie Pas. She says that the music was informed by a dualistic relationship to “dance music and club culture”; a fascination and disgust that emerged after the conclusion of her trip. “Touring and playing live late at night can lead to destructive habits and behaviors,” she said. Adieux Au Dancefloor (“Farewell to the Dancefloor”) is the result of redirecting the chaotic energy of constant clubbing towards creative ends.
In line with it’s inspiration, Adieux Au Dancefloor is much more informed by club music than her previous releases. The sounds and their presentation are pleasing and spacious and and made to appeal to a dancefloor sensibility, aligning it with Essaie Pas’ recent release Demain Est Une Autre Nuit, a fantastically shadowy and phantasmagoric album of analog dance music.
In the album’s opening moment, “Dedicate My Life,” Davidson conjures the beautifully unhinged spirit of Throbbing Gristle, with pointillist synths, relentless drums, and needles of heated noise that recall the profane and industrial heartbeat of “Hot on the Heels of Love.” When Davidson begins reciting her poem, she introduces the album’s narrator, an empowered, effortlessly cool, feminist badass. “People ask me/What I do with my time/Listen/I dedicate my life,” Davidson says. At one point her voice disappears beneath the swirling noise, as a tempo change provokes ecstatic body motion. It might feature a poet as its narrator, but this is not a "contemplative" album; this is dynamic, kinetic music wants to provoke a flurry of action.
The album retains this speedball excitement as it weaves it’s way through instrumental tracks and poems in both English in French. In tracks like “Denial,” Davidson explores the upper limits of her analog gear, pumping up the pace and pulsations of her synth to a point that finds the song almost unravel on itself. It reminded me of the chaotic beauty of watching viral videos of washing machines self-destructing.
Even in its drapery of fog and acid, Adieux Au Dancefloor consistently finds feel-good moments. Take for example, “Good Vibes,” which lifts up Davidson’s call to arms (“This song is dedicated to all the jealous people”) with a pleasantly jarring and rough-hewn synth loop. Or “Naive to the Bone,” the album’s funniest and most writerly number with lines like “Let me picture my future, a large room where you can hear the silence/No space for arrogance, no pain in my chest/Just the beating of my heart” conjuring Anne Sexton. She also flashes a sharp and quotidian sense of humor, castigating an unnamed enemy’s fashion choices: “In The Middle Ages, people used to wear clocks, it's 2016, get real.”
The album culminates in its title track, which gathers together her wit into an unreal screed and personal exorcism of nightlife’s inescapable vapidity. Singing in French, she starts the song by painting a hellish scene: “A stranger taking a picture of himself with his phone/A girl lying on the floor, her eyes rolled upwards.” She shrouds the burn of her words with the most exciting and seedy sounds of the album. It smartly distorts the content of her poem with the sensation her music produces, making those lines seem even more affecting. As the song reaches it’s at end, Davidson says “There are no more reasons to celebrate/Who will pity me in the morning if I lose my mind?,” presenting a hard question for the brain already sapped of serotonin.
Throughout Adieux Au Dancefloor, Davidson constantly turns these moments of powerful doubt and bad mojo into joyous dance music, making the album a strenuous mental and physical exercise. The music here presents a criticism of the very place it is meant to live. What Davidson does here is not just a piece of music, or a set of poems, but a critical dialogue framed as a brooding electronic epic.
