Review Summary: The boars are on the loose.
There’s a nonchalantly-muttered line in the mouthful verses of “À l’envers À l’endroit” that goes something to the effect of “It looks like the white dove’s got 300 tons of lead shot in its wings.” The song title roughly translates to “Upside down, right side up,” and its delivery of imagery such as fruitlessly searching for open spaces in a cramped box and drowning in puddles are about as resigned in the chaotic state of affairs as anything is on
Des Visages Des Figures, Noir Désir’s final album. After a little over a decade’s worth of material and cementing themselves as a staple of French rock ‘n roll, the group’s closing bow is a subdued and ominous opus that ushers in the new millennium’s fears with frightening accuracy.
An inescapable sense of foreboding permeates practically every nook and cranny of
Des Visages Des Figures, from Franyó Aatoth’s downright menacing cover artwork to the group’s haunting, ghostly instrumentation. It’s a record built on impending doom, and terrible coincidences completely out of the band’s control make it all the more distressing to listen to; considering its lyrical content,
Des Visages Des Figures’ September 11th, 2001 release date and frontman Bertrand Cantat’s scandals which effectively doomed the quartet’s career transform already tense cuts like the apocalyptic “Le grand incendie” and the unnerving “L’appartement” from simply solid jams into prophetic slabs of disorder.
As that sense of distrust, unrest, and fatigue continues to slither its way around the hypnotic “L’enfant roi,” the march of “Lost,” the dreamy wordplay-stuffed title track and more,
Des Visages Des Figures completely envelops the listener in a sense of dread, the light flickering dimmer and farther away with each passing second. Brief respites in energy in the form of shuffley hit “Le vent nous portera” and loud, aggressive rock interlude “Son style 1” are just that; brief, serving to make the depressing lows of poet Léo Ferré-inspired “Des armes” and the desperate romantic pleading of “Bouquet de nerfs” all the more crushing. Yet for all its dark and mysterious imagery, there’s a shocking reliability in the hooks spread throughout
Des Visages Des Figures. Whether it’s Cantat’s operatic baritone stealing the show or his settled-back stream-of-consciousness deliveries winding around the band’s emotional strings and diverse percussion, there’s nary a moment on
Des Visages Des Figures’ first 11 tracks that loses the listener’s interest and focus, even for a non-fluent French speaker.
Where that all intentionally gets thrown out the window is the album’s - and indeed, the band’s - last track ever, the sprawling, bitter, 24-minute rallying cry against globalization and the EU that is “L’Europe.” Swaying back and forth in a dizzying jazz rhythm that rises from near-silence to total frenzy not just once but twice, Cantat provokes the listener and taunts European officials and organizations with downright distressing spoken-word poetry between guest Brigitte Fontaine’s morbid radio host-like announcements and horns that pop out of the speakers like jump scares. Sure to be a divisive track, where the rest of
Des Visages Des Figures remains musical first and moody second (even if ever so slightly, like in “Son style 2”), “L’Europe” isn’t concerned with such things, and all the buildup over the record’s previous 50-odd minutes comes to a head with frantic wailing and recited statements that climb and plummet with an urgency unheard up until that point. When “L’Europe” finally does fade out among Middle Eastern flute melodies and radio static, the other shoe still doesn’t feel like it’s fully dropped, but the feeling that it’s dangling there by a lace is enough (if not
more meaningful) to get the message across.
A fantastic but understandably overlooked experimental rock album among English-speaking audiences,
Des Visages Des Figures satisfied the itch for an album of accessible discomfort in the early 2000's and looks poised to once again as the world inches closer and closer to the edge of disaster. In trying times where bigoted political figures of first-world states who subsist on rhetoric that encourages fear and suspicion are on the rise, revisiting
Des Visages Des Figures and its similar snapshots from years past make it the perfect companion to a worst case scenario. There are no guarantees when the boars are on the loose, and don’t be mistaken; even if not in power yet, the boars are most
definitely on the loose.
Je répète: les sangliers sont lachés.
