I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: FEU THÉRÈSE-Ça Va Cogner [CST049] (2007).

Bands change sounds from one album to another all the time, but few as radically as this one. From weirdo psychedelic band to French new wave pop band, from 6 minute instrumentals to 2 and 3 minute songs with vocals.

At times the album feels like Kraftwerk meets Serge Gainsbourg (which I know is an unfair reduction, but when your singer mostly talk/sings in a deep French voice, the comparison is apt.  And yet the album is fairly poppy and catchy as well.

“A Nos Amours” opens the disc with three minutes of synth happiness. It even has a section where the music drops out and the bass resumes its place.  Recall in their debut that at 4 minutes of each song something radically different happened.  Now the songs just end. “Visage Sous Nylon” features the more Kraftwerk sound—but it’s an almost organic Kraftwerk (which I know makes no sense but there it is). “Les Deserts des Azurs” has a kind of Tangerine Dream feel with washes of analog synths.

“Le Bruit du Pollen La Nuit” has a weird kind of synthy 70 s rock feel but the music almost drops out entirely (but not quite) while the vocals (in French) are spoken. It feels like it’s mocking and serious at the same time.  It’s also got a discoey chorus singing “You’re just a just a just a pretty boy!”

“Nada” has a synthy almost disco feel.  “Ça Va Cogner” is just over 5 minutes long and consists of various delicate swells of synths.  I kept waiting to hear The Beach Boys “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” burst forth from the waves, until about half way in when it turns into a simple delicate melody and a children’s chorus. “Les Enfants” is a simple ditty with hummed lyrics.  It’s poppy and catchy as anything

“Ferrari en Feu Pt. 2” is a fast synth songs with slap bass. (Part 1 was on the debut and sounded nothing like this).  “La Nuit Est un Femme” is a slow synth track with a female backing vocals over a sung male lead. The end of the song adds some loud textures to this otherwise sweet song bringing in some really interesting tensions.  The disc ends with “Laisse Briller Tes Yeux Dans le Soleil,” a synthy instrumental that ends with cheesy charm.

This album is really wonderful–surprisingly catchy and dancey and yet exotic enough to not sound like anything else that (most) people are familiar with.  All of the Constellation albums are streaming on their site, but this one is especially worth checking out.

[READ: April 15, 2014] Tales from the Clockwork Empire Book 1

I was very intrigued by this book because of the steampunk nature and because I have a strange fascination with clockwork ideas–a technology that is precise and interesting yet which never really took off beyond clocks and small toys because other technologies were more powerful

I thought that the cover was kind of interesting with this gigantic metal head holding ball.  But on closer look the man in the ball was very poorly computer rendered and that should have been a tip off.  For all of the people in the book have this same unfinished-rendered look.  It looks a lot like storyboards of unfinished versions of Pixar films.  I mean, really cheesy and really unfinished and really unsettling. This is especially noticeable on the rendering of Napoleon Bonaparte in the “end credits” of the book.

I hate to harp on the graphics, but this is a graphic novel after all.  All of the non human elements looks fine, many look even better than fine, bordering on photo realistic.  But the humans all seem ugh, creepy and stiff and just dropped on top of these scenes.  It is terribly distracting and may even make the dialogue feel stiffer than it actually is.  Because the dialogue felt very stiff and mechanical as well.

It is the kind of story that seems historically accurate in the details and works very hard to let you know that it is accurate.  Indeed, in the end of the book Duerden goes to great lengths to show the accuracies in the writing.  But there’s so little flow in the dialogue that it seems like a lecture.  Basically the entire book feels like, not a first draft, but like the draft before the final draft.  Like the book is going to go back to have a final polish to make the dialogue breezier and make the pictures look better.

This is all a shame since I haven;t eve talked about the story yet.

It’s an interesting story.  In a nutshell, Napoleon is using clockwork machinery to battle the English.  There are clockwork submersibles and clockwork manikins and clockwork spiders and the like.  The way Napoleon found these clockwork mechanisms is really fascinating (but sort of quickly talked about) and would actually make a better story than the one that is the main focus of the book.

There are many elements of this story–Napoleon, a historic battleship, clockwork gizmos, and even a reporter with a secret and a Lady with a separate life–and they are thrown in there with lots of detail but no nuance.  Even the way the story ends–with what would be an interesting bookending device but is in fact just an ending device.  I loved the ending, I just wish it had not just come out of nowhere.

I appreciated a lot of the conflicts, I liked the idea of the writer Calamus Quill doing daring things and writing about them.  And I liked that Lady Isabella was there to help him out (and actually write his stories).  But while I found her attitudes laudable, her discussion things felt forced and unnatural:

“They call this the age of reason and yet I fear it is totally unreasonable to expect women to constrict themselves in a corset.  And as for leather…. elegance suggests we can only wear it as gloves or riding boots.”

True sentiments indeed, but this is spoken as a presentation not as dialogue with her lady in waiting (who is younger and, as we will see, hipper than she is).  Yet when the lady in waiting takes her place (in a classic switcheroo)–the scene is so over the top that it feels way out of place.

I imagine that this could make a good film–the ancient Egypt stuff would be especially cool with a good CGI budget and so would the clockwork creatures and toys.  And actors could smooth over the clunkiness of the dialogue, too.  So I hope that Duerden (who is credited with “illustration” on th cover but rather “visualization” on the title page) can interest someone in making this film.  And maybe buying a better rendering program.

I see that Books 2 and 3 are out already.  I’m curious to see how the story continues, but I’m not sure that I really want to force my way through them.

For ease of searching, I include: Feu Thérèse Ça Va Cogner