Perhaps appropriately for a genre of music rooted in the enigmatic and the obscure, the minimal synth revival has quietly become a movement without ever quite becoming a bandwagon. Montreal duo Essaie Pas are just one of a scattered network of contemporary groups reviving the sound and aesthetic of a lost generation of DIY-minded synthpop artists of the '70s and '80s, who either by accident or design ended up too rudimentary, too melancholic, or too plain odd to fulfill the "pop" part of the equation. You might, if you chose, chalk this up to another case of retromania, of modern musicians mining post-punk history in lieu of looking forward. But in a club music demimonde that holds up druggy hedonism and flashy maximalism as guiding principles, there is something attractive about minimal synth's severe, austere poise. This music got few props at the time, but at its best—and certainly, Demain Est Une Autre Nuit captures the modern sound more or less at its best—it feels alluringly other: a secret, shadowy wormhole that tunnels through layers of electronic music history.
Essaie Pas are the husband-and-wife duo of Marie Davidson and Pierre Guerineau—she a solo recording artist, he a music engineer who has worked with Montreal musicians such as Dirty Beaches and Femminielli. This, their fourth album and debut for DFA—the title of which translates as "Tomorrow Is Another Night"—was born out of long winter nights rehearsing at one of Montreal's deserted industrial complexes, which the pair occupied after returning from tour to find their studio and practice space had been shuttered.
Some of this sense of frigidity and dislocation has found its way into Essaie Pas' music – or perhaps more accurately, has intensified and authenticated a spirit that was already there. Moments like "Dépassée par le fantasme" and "Carcajou 3" recall their New York peers Xeno & Oaklander in their skittery analog intricacy. But Essaie Pas are also wise to dance floor imperatives: deeper into the record, "Facing the Music" locks into a mute, driving techno redolent of DFA labelmates Factory Floor, while "Lights Out" is a twilit acid pulse through which Davidson periodically announces the title, voice smothered with echo.
The more song-centered moments on Demain Est Une Autre Nuit offer a sense of the pair's influences. Vocals are largely delivered in French, Guerineau dourly intoning longer, narrative passages and Davidson singing choruses, or just holding long, trilling notes that dissolve into texture. Singing in French gives Essaie Pas an umbilical link to earlier continental synth and coldwave groups such as Elli et Jacno (who Essaie Pas covered on their previous album Nuit de noce) and Asylum Party, groups whose lyrics often tipped beyond lovelorn melodrama to a place of bereft existentialism. "Retox" is a tale of romantic separation riven with violent imagery, nights spent battling insomnia, and fantasies of screams that bruise flesh; at one point we hear Guerineau lift a receiver and key in the Montreal area code before apparently perishing from the sheer ennui of it all. On "Le port du masque est de rigueur" ("Wearing a Mask Is Mandatory") he picks morbidly over the bones of a love affair. "J'ai tenté de t'oublier/ Comme on noie une portée de chatons," he sings—"I tried to forget you/ Like drowning a litter of kittens"—as electronics gurgle away maniacally on one chord.
"La Chute" ends the album on a dreamier note, a bloody Valentine with just a hint of yacht rock gleam to the synths, and listening to it, it's not hard to imagine Davidson and Guerineau working together at night, as frost collects on windowpanes and breath clouds in the air. Back in the late '00s, while minimal electronic music was the toast of underground Manhattan thanks to Veronica Vasicka's Minimal Wave imprint and the club night Wierd, DFA's attention was elsewhere, on the pneumatic house moves of the Juan MacLean or Shit Robot. Yet Demain Est Une Autre Nuit feels not just a good fit for the label's vintage-modern aesthetic, but a culmination of something. Perhaps it's simply that this weird, mannered synth music is no throwback, but merely a style ahead of its time, and one that only now is coming of age.
