For all the talk about Bernard Fevre's unlikely resurgence under his Black Devil Disco Club guise—the mystery behind that now-beloved 1978 Disco Club EP, the no-steps-missed comeback 28 Later, the all-star lovefest of *Circus—*one aspect of his musical background seems underplayed. Before the self-titled space-disco gem that put Black Devil on the map 35 years ago, Fevre worked in the production music library trenches. Rather than a nascent Giorgio Moroder-caliber pop innovator, Fevre was more of a style-hopping freelancer whose best work capitalized on streamlining pre-existing trends. Think early 70s Eurodisco progenitors like the Chakachas of “Jungle Fever” fame or Cerrone's work with Kongas, then add first-generation synthesizers and a deliberate eccentricity. Not for nothing is the 1975 L'Illustration Musicale LP that remains the most renowned record under his own name titled “The Strange World of Bernard Fevre”.
The catch with library music is that it's a sort of work-for-hire situation, meant to be a bit modular and generic even at its best. It's a field that can be just as prone to dated imitation as it is timeless experimentation, ignoring the divide between catchiness and cornballery often enough that it falls under irony-courting cringe-whimsy. That's the mode Fevre falls back on in Black Moon White Sun: the music stumbles its way through an uneven if reasonably fun back catalog, gathering all Fevre's odder creative tics into eight tracks' worth of irritainment that feels geared more for post-Barbarella retro-space age camp smirking than any dancefloor worth its bodies.
That's not a bad goal in itself. But there's little room for error when you're trying to evoke a Kubrick-goes-bananas satellite/supperclub vibe. Think less cosmic disco and more a mish-mash of synthesized innovations. Early 70s prog Moogs play mid 80s synthpop with 90s techno chords; rearrange the decades as needed but it's still chronologically dissonant and oddly detached. Midtempo synth-lounge grooves like “Bee Boop” or “Just 3” are diverting their first couple spins, mostly for the hazy nostalgia they might wind up evoking, but give them a little more time and it starts feeling like audio furniture.
It's not just rigidly unfunky, but willfully quirky to a point where even the most die-hard fromage enthusiast might wonder if it wouldn't hurt to be at least a little bit serious. It's grimace-worthy when Fevre dredges up those early 70s notions of Euro-tourist “ethnic” beats, like the bongo-driven quasi-indigenous “Sun Dance Totem” or the goopy cod-Latin “Mexo Mambo”. If it's possible for instrumental tracks to collapse under their own milky sentiment, there's a pretty grueling stretch in the middle: “Maymallow” does Pet Shop Boys dirty by extracting all the sly pathos and pop wit that made their hits great, padding it with tinny synth-horns that would make Stock-Aitken-Waterman wrinkle their noses. “Star Dot Com” is the relentlessly chirpy background music for every badly-tracked VHS presentation of “Just What Is the Information Superhighway?” And aside from being saccharine as all hell, “The Kid in Me” demonstrates the biggest failing of Black Moon White Sun. Fevre's voice, best filtered through the Dalek-soul voicebox that made cuts like “H Friend” so alluringly creepy, goes largely untreated—and he sounds like Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor if he was drunk, had a frog in his throat, and pronounced all his syllables in reverse so his vocals had to be played backwards. You probably wouldn't want to watch the poorly-dubbed 1981 Buck Rogers knockoff this music would score.
