LE FEU AU LAC (vinyl)

Description

They often say there's no fire on the lake, but what would a fire on the lake even look like? This new album by Chocolat Billy ignites it, but it doesn't set fire to a dance floor of Christs walking on water. The urgency is indeed there; it's right behind us, informing, spreading, but it's entangled in a "danceable solution" as Brian Ferry would have said in the days of Roxy Music. With Chocolat Billy, you don't dance in circles; you travel in dreams to half-built lands. Jacques seems to be blowing into his tuba, which one imagines to be a bit dusty, and this simple displacement of air transforms into a saxophone note that draws the journey from the cave to the river in its wake. Besides Jacques, whose various companions' fates remain unknown, we encounter several families of figures. Where are you going, Zolatale? "To the cinema" seems to be the answer of the following track, and we visit Italy, the Cinecitta side, to the rhythm of a shimmering afro-beat, taking the time to greet the great Mario Bava, then a Mediterranean California of acid-synth Beach Boys, all the way to an immense Apartment reminiscent of a tango, not Piazzolla's but Zbigniew Rybczynski's film. We even dance in the dark, following a reptilian progression, heedless of the corners and walls that our swaying hips might encounter. And above all, we don't dance alone. We don't stand still; the tracks move forward, compact, on their sustained rhythms, but we can linger to whistle to the "Orientologue." The fire on the lake doesn't create a bubble and doesn't give in to panic. It is traversed by colorful and sinuous lines that intertwine flexibly but can sometimes break abruptly, as the cover art suggests. Flamboyant scutigeres versus office rats, this intense text, found at Novo Local in Bordeaux, seems to have drifted to finally find its place in the band's music. One can imagine that other materials that enrich it were collected along the way, kept aside, before finding the moment to be brought out again, little things, like Jacques with his found mask, which is a bit old. – – Whether for dance or for life, there is an urgency to keep our feet on the ground. And if we find ourselves looking at our shoes, it's not shoegazing, but to check if they'll hold up. – – Jean-Francois Magre – –.