C EST A MOI CA

Description

Gwendoline's music doesn't give a damn. She has no project. She tries nothing, they repeat it to anyone who wants to hear it, you just have to listen. Everyone will hear what they want in 'C'est à moi, ça', the new album by the two Brest natives signed to Born Bad. Some would like them to be Joy Division, Noir Boy George, Bruit noir, Ventre de biche, the Bérus. They would want their wave to be cold, shlag, dark... but that's not their problem. Misunderstandings can kill in this business, for pity's sake, let's leave these two alone. Singing about drinking to this extent is no longer guided by self-hatred, it's cultural. It's a social acquisition, they have the right to shit on Rennes when the suits on segways have invaded their favorite bars. It's a typical thing for the included to find them depressed; just listen to 'Le sang de papa et maman' to understand which artesian well they draw the stale pastis that springs from this record. - - There are songs that invite you to sing along because there's room for us in them. Gwendoline calculates nothing; if it screams as simply as at a football match, it's not to fill stadiums, it's just how it came about. So we shout that we too want to 'find them at the PMU at eight in the morning, to go on a retirement trip on a moped, with all the friends.' Their past anthem, taken from 'Après c'est gobelet', has a few cousins in the album, notably Rock 2000 or Pinata. It may be less elaborate than year 01 as a revolution, but it will do for Pierre Barrett and Mickaël Olivette, two magnificent losers for whom 'the end of the world began when they were born.' It's less written than Pascal Bouaziz, but as they assert, 'writing like Baudelaire, they don't give a damn.' And fundamentally: they state the terms. Those of France nutriscore Z like Zemmour. Their language tastes like a damp coaster and smells like the tired microphone of living in the drawer of a bar-tabac counter. They pronounce the Rs as if to spit on everything, because everything deserves it: meetic, holiday clubs, the generation before, the one after, low-cost living, chicken croquettes, trash TV that eats brains, 'people who know how to talk.' And themselves, undoubtedly, because they have other things to do than devise socially responsible plans for their record. - - And we want to agree, not choose, not know. They don't understand why, after years of losing, wonderful people want to take selfies with them, why suddenly, 'every night is the night of the year.' And it won't get better with this new album thought up as a duo at home, literally recorded at the very end of things, in Finistère. The dark, radical, and no-frills instrumentals (Jake and Romain, guitar/keyboards) give a boost to Pierre and Micka, complementary bodies to spew on everything, with an exceptional sense of phrasing. - - They are not to blame if we love them, and that already annoys them. We love them because their anger is justified. We no longer have the luxury of nuance when everything tastes like soft butter that has gone bad.