VACUUM SEALED (vinyl)

Description

For five months, it was night. When Benjamin Dupont woke up, the sun had been below the horizon for hours. Between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., secretly locked away at Studio S**** with Marc Portheau, they stack the guitars, turn the amps around, strip down the riffs, simplify the arrangements and arbitrate. At daybreak, Lauriane Petit sees Benjamin come home as she leaves for work. Without a word, he lies down. The sun pulls at his eyelids while, in his head, the journey continues: the bits of music he recorded all night slip into his dreams. No drugs were needed to record 'Vacuum Sealed'. The intensity of the ten songs that make up the album was enough to make the rest of the world disappear. The music is so massive, its presence so thick, that after a month of work, Benjamin and Marc could no longer even speak to each other. It was all already there, in front of them. 'Vacuum Sealed' was going to become an absolute classic. One of the cornerstones of their generation, they who also have - or had - a foot in Villejuif Underground, Pleasure Principle, Bisous de Saddam, Dame Blanche... Like all great albums, it opens with a screaming introduction ('Greeting From The Space Boys', a raised middle finger from the whole band from the stratosphere - namely Lauriane Petit on bass and vocals, Raphael Berrichon and Medhi Briand on guitars, Paul Ramon on drums), follows with hallucinatory songs ('Excuses' sung by Lauriane like a Kim Deal composition, 'Sad Toys' or the paroxysm of dancing melancholy, 'Pictures Of You' or the best guitar riff ever played with a vibrato) before leaving you hanging by a thread. At this point in the record, you think Bryan's Magic Tears would be the gifted son of The Jesus & Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream. In 1991, this side of the album would have been recorded by a British band and released on Creation. Except that we are thirty years later, that it is made by a band with a Norman soul and released on Born Bad Records. So you have to turn the record over. 'I don't want to be 33 and doing Teenage Rock with a cap backwards and denim shorts.' After showing their muscles on one side of the album, Benjamin Dupont digs a little deeper into his own veins and transfigures his band. They were taken for drugged-up slackers, a band that makes noise because they have three guitars on stage, slackers singing nonsense in gibberish. The B side of 'Vacuum Sealed' features three autobiographical pop songs with absolutely impeccable lyrics and melodies. In 'Tuesday' - 'a song about when it's Tuesday and you've got zero serotonin because you took ecstasy all weekend' - 'Isolation' and 'Always', despite the drum machines and that false air of lightness, it is the Smiths fan speaking. The great melody wrangler. 'I think the biggest difference between Bryan's Magic Tears and other bands of our kind is that a lot of bands forget they're going to sing over their music.' One last demonstration of overpowering production later - 'Superlava' - and there you have it: you thought Bryan's Magic Tears were taking drugs to make music to take drugs to. In fact, they do the opposite. They compose a repertoire that will outlive them, surpass them, that we can already imagine in the mouths and under the fingers of future generations who will rediscover this album in wonder. Because 'Vacuum Sealed' will be that. One of the guitar classics of the early 20s. And there is nothing we can do about it. Their talent is too great.