Like all Francophiles, Casey Dienel wants her Francophilia to be taken seriously. Or so you'd gather from the heady account of her new EP as a "love letter to France, French music, and the French language." Called Luniculaire, a whimsical name that suggests a train to the moon, you might expect these five songs to assume a dreamlike continental elegance that caresses the senses. You'd be wrong. Each of these songs, out of three covers and two originals, are rendered in a shaky French and touched with a spirit of curious experimentalism.
All this might surprise admirers of Phylactery Factory, her comparatively traditional, and solidly English second album, the debut under her White Hinterland moniker. That gorgeous production drifted between nightclub sophistication and swaying, swinging folk. Sure enough, bits of this aesthetic do endure in Luniculaire. This is an elegant affair from any angle. But Dienel has ambitiously left much of the last record's refinement behind for a less forthright, at times abrasive, style of production: partial to broken rhythms, freeform meanderings, and atonality.
"Requiem Pour Un Con", originally sung by Serge Gainsbourg in the 1968 Jean Gabin flop Le Pacha, crumbles a bit during White Hinterland's rowdy process of interpretation. Where the original vibrated with Gainsbourg's fusion of erotic confidence and bohemian suavity, the cover comes off as partly unhinged, even a little spastic. Blame lies with the chaos of squelches behind her, courtesy of guitarist Alexis Gideon: a wayward blurting that chips away at the chic edifice built up by all the spunky metallic breakbeats and restless vocals. Thanks to Gideon, we get the impression of a rudely interrupted dinner party. Too messy to be called a complete triumph, much of Gainsbourg's clattering minimalism and creepy-cool tension nevertheless survives in this daring recasting. (And extra points must be given to the brave woman who tackles this testosterone-drenched revenge ballad, which drops the Gallic c-bomb in the title, a more explosive term then: in 1968, the title was printed as "Requiem Pour Un C...")
Gainsbourg was the éminence grise (and Humbert Humbert) behind yé-yé music, but it was Françoise Hardy who most thoroughly embodied this uniquely French species of pop, which joined innocence and romance in the body of the nymphet chanteuse. Hardy's classic "Mon Amie La Rose" poetically captured the dark truth behind the brightly flirtatious yé-yé, massaging the theme of beauty's impermanence by tracing the life of a rose in the garden. Gainsbourg all but lived by the girl-as-flower analogy, but Hardy dives deeper here, musing on mortality, not romance, in a silken voice that seems both existential and optimistic. Dienel's languorous update is less convincing, botching the Blochian final words: "Believe, those who can believe/ Me, I need hope/ Or else I am nothing." When the original's pathos-laden ballad edged dangerously close to cheesy sentimentalism, the clear-headed vocals, pillowy harmonies, and tender troubadour guitars pulled it back. The mopey, clumsy violins on the cover nudge it over the top.
More adventurous is her fresh vision of "J'ai 26 Ans" from Brigitte Fontaine's criminally unsung Comme à la Radio, a record that houses the startling combination of yé-yé ingenue and free jazz wizards the Art Ensemble of Chicago. "In the original Brigitte Fontaine song, there's a lot of implied drone, with the middle Eastern timbres in the bass lines that're being played," Dienel has explained. The fact is that the song was nearly all bassline. No surprise that, over a sea of delay, feral howls, and tribal percussion, the implied drone turns explicit, into a fiery dirge from the Fertile Crescent. A far cry from the haunting, artsy sparseness done by Fontaine, the busy maximalism still works as a clever interpretation.
Dienel's own two compositions are impressive, and wildly different. Fans of Phylactery Factory will welcome the genteel swing of "Lunirascible", which restores the piano-- and that feathery voice-- to the fore. Alike in mood, but a radical departure in methodology, "Chant de Grillon" glides along like a Krautrock layered-guitar epic. It sails on a motorik groove over glistening, spacy effects, rising steadily into a Caribou-style frenzy of percussion.
Luniculaire uncovers a surprising side of Casey Dienel. We knew her as the deviser of jazzy, brightly melodic, and somehow disarmingly childlike tunes. This EP introduces an artist willing to embrace the ugly sound, to forgo indie-pop politesse for art-rock attitude, to sing in a language she can't flawlessly speak. The missed opportunities and the overreaches here point nevertheless to that rare thing, a true and thoughtful risk taker, whose gutsy, thoroughly imagined songs signal new directions for an indie auteur in the making.
