Soft Metals cohorts Gold Zebra have done a pretty decent lap of the internets with Love, French, Better but we thought we’d do our best Marty McFly impression and hang on to the bumper of this passing bandwagon.
One of the nice things about posting things on 20JFG before they’ve had a chance to be contextualised by our blogging brethren is the opportunity to live for a moment in a world not already described, demarcated and categorised by others. We like the alchemical properties of music, especially its ability to construct functioning universes between our ears. Love, French, Better does an awfully good job of conjuring up that alluring bleakness that makes a pensive moment gazing out into the blue pre-dawn world from a concrete doorway feel like the most exciting thing in the world. Perhaps it’s a testament to the solidity of the world that any colonisation is immaterial. It still feels reassuringly lonely in here.
A minimal synth throb dominates this but replaces our beloved ‘Italians’ disco genesis with a colder wavier one. There was always something panoramic in that echoing guitar, so beloved of late 90s post-rock that seems so lonely, exposed and vast — here it slides in and around Julie’s deadpan chanteuse.
Gold Zebra stuck this up on their Bandcamp for free at the start of July although it’s available below for your convenience. The 7″ is forthcoming on Visage Musique, which’ll be nice.
GOLD ZEBRA- Love, French, Better
Epilogue -This post is tagged with Visage Musique
“
A cedar portal.
An almost perfect geometry.
Circumscribe so as to genuflect:
From the east the sound of forlorn gulls
chasing the lazy sun westwards.
The chugging drone of
lightweight floatplanes above.
Thick blades of ferns
revel in the shade,
their secrets prevail.
It’s cool here.
Only the slightest chance of sea ahead,
choked as it may be by kelp
and rapid currents.
I CAN SEE IT ON THE UNDERSIDE OF THESE POPLARS
Or the running water
invisible, beneath my feet
slipping through layers of busted shale
So that pieces of the ocean floor are exposed
Black and proud like the cormorants
who nest on its bluffs.
“The day we hit the coast”
Shattered yet pacific
placid as snow crowning hemlocks.
An icy calm where winds
had ravaged once before.
As useful as blue sky at night.
I name new things.
Tiny cities where 7 sisters once were
or like the faces named in stacks:
magnetic and resonant.
Yours sincerely
tassels22nd July 2011