Brother-or-lover duo Faux Real’s debut album Faux Ever has been a long time coming, its origins ambiguous as the two-of-a-kind minds behind it. Since starting the band in 2018, Elliott and Virgile Arndt’s anti-serious art pop has seemingly become a hedonistic staple of every music festival worth your money, summer after summer, city after city. It’s unsurprising; their live show revels in semi-satirical barefoot boyband choreography, skin-tight crop tops, crowd-splitting high kicks and at least twenty seconds of improvised flute. Imagine a Franco-American rival to Hugh Grant’s fictional romcom band PoP! – dressed, when dressed, in all-white – lathered in sweat, immensely likeable, relentlessly pirouetting to their entertainment utopia.
The word of mouth speaks for itself. But therein too lies the jeopardy at the heart of Faux Ever: for all the band’s athletic saltation, how can a spectacle so alive and high octane be documented in a format so still as a record?
Well, the question is answered almost immediately. Album opener ‘Faux Maux’ harbours the same intense alchemy at the heart of a Faux Real experience – the silly peaks and sillier troughs, the crystalline call and response chorus that becomes rhetorical one sung-along lyric too late (“so, call me up! I’ll turn you down”), the gliding psych-pop variations of Kevin Parker riffs freed from their pseudo-intellectual shackles, the transcendental new wave highs of Talk Talk without the meditative space. ‘Rent Free’, then, is a perfect example of the band’s many lives. Dazzlingly out-of-focus guitars reminiscent of late noughties bedroom rock ricochet against trashy kicks and bass, while auto-tuned vocals progressively intensify around the pair’s self-proclaimed manifesto to dance with total abandon. It’s no joke: “I can tell that there’s a lot on the line.”
There are moments of real texture and craft to Faux Ever – contextually important given the residing absurdities and character play, and the potential distractions that still frequently distract. Each moment of quality – each referential nod to their influences – feels like an Arndt brother reaching out of the record and reassuring us that Faux Ever is an album written and recorded within the possibilities of the band, not as the only possibility of the band. And, on the whole, it’s a hit factory: ‘Love on the Ground’ is a metronomic earworm Alexis Taylor would be proud of, ‘Full Circle’ – originally released over two years ago – is a manipulated gem, The Residents of the dancefloor with a near-perfect indie dance chorus.
Admittedly, the album’s six pre-release singles contain the bona fide highlights – a reckoning they hint at in ‘Workhorse’ (“get those streams up, or die”). But as the lime green embers fade on a summer filled with some of the most exciting pop releases of a generation, it’s not trite to wish a natural DIY successor in a Faux Real Fall (a Fall Real? The name needs work, even if the album doesn’t). Within these eleven songs are real human efforts at connection, whether it’s one big game of Spy Kids dress-up or not. Decadent post-punk and sleazy eurotrash are heralded as two sides of the same, very melted coin. And at the record’s end, ‘Scratch’ is a sore thumb of throbbing experimental darkwave, the brothers riding a counterfeit pony out of the one hit factory.
For well over a year, Faux Real have been handing out presidential pin badges at their live shows, all caps reading “I liked Faux Real before their groundbreaking debut album Faux Ever even came out.” Writing as a proud badge owner, the best – and most relieved – compliment I can give is that I now like Faux Real after their groundbreaking debut album has come out, too. It’s much more than a footnote to the live show, and it’s something to believe in.
