Halfway through the Dr Seuss book Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, our young protagonist bursts out of a dull cul-de-sac and into a Technicolor tent of music “where boom bands are playing”. You get a similar feeling listening to this album by surrealist US-Belgian duo Fievel Is Glauque, a jazz-pop LP that yanks you into its own world, full of songs scurrying about Seuss-ishly.
Supplanted by six other instrumentalists, the pair would record one take for each song, then another, then a final one with extra improvisatory details, generating as many as 100 musical stems to put into a final arrangement. Coupled with poetic lyrics that often rush by in a torrent and time signatures that change on a dime, it could have been a mess – and yet these teetering song-towers never topple.
That reflects well on their foundations, built with brilliant melody and musicianship – for example Transparent, powered by an electric sitar riff running in tandem with an equally melodic bassline. André Sacalxot’s flute lines and sax solos chirrup and yearn throughout, and singer Ma Clément does much the same: frequently quizzical and gabbling, she gives a more lugubrious, gentle performance on Love Weapon to make it the album’s standout.
Overall, it ends up somewhere between Julia Holter and Black Country, New Road’s chamber-pop fantasias, Stereolab’s quirkiest moments and the psych-funk symphonics of Rotary Connection – which is to say it’s actually in its very own peculiar corner of pop.
