Review Summary: Gabber, french chanson, and opera singing shouldn’t work this well
Sometimes you stumble upon artists that just
nail their aesthetic, ones that deftly combine radical ambition with tight songwriting.
Ascendant Vierge (
Virgo Rising in Booba’s language) are of that same ilk.
Ascendant Vierge are a Brussels-based French duo (yes, I know I’m also a Brussels-based French boi and can’t escape my origins in music discovery). They play gabber, a hyper-fast subgenre of hardcore techno from the 90s hailing out of Rotterdam (you can imagine how hard these beats go). The genre resurged in France in the past decade, primarily thanks to the Casual Gabberz collective from which Ascendant Vierge’s DJ Paul Seul came. He paired up with Mathilde Fernandez in 2019, whose angelic voice carries as much classical music heritage as it does Kate Bush homage. A couple of EPs and singles already showed promises, but
Une Nouvelle Chance is the one recording that successfully expands the band’s soundscape to new heights while reaffirming the strength of their core sound.
Their
gabber-meets-prettyvox blend is, without any surprise, both celebratory and hyper. “IRL” wastes no time in delivering a hard dance beat, on top of which Fernandez’s angelic voice cooed about evading the virtual world to come back to reality. From the get-go, Ascendant Vierge display their extreme modernity in form and substance. Their brand of gabber does not resemble its 90s ancestor: lyrically, the track questions the very contemporary duality between reality and virtuality, and spices its gabber roots with trance, EDM, or some slight house influences.
That genre-hopping across the electronic music universe repeats in the whole album: “A l’infini” thus dives hard into trance music, “Dedans” wears its shiny Eurodance coat, while “Slowlita” dips into breakbeat. In its best moments,
Une Nouvelle Chance attains life-affirming heights, for example on the mega-hymn “Au Top”. A soft piano soon leaves the chat to a bludgeoning, four-on-the-floor euphoric hardstyle that reaches its apex during the second chorus, with its rising notes accompanying auto-empowering lyrics in a driving and elated manner.
Une Nouvelle Chance is fortunately only sometimes focused on making
opera boom-boom gabber, as it dips its toes into other electronic music waters. “Lubies” nails the synthpop balance of electronic and pop by lifting its already stadium-ready chorus with pounding synth lines. There even are some French chanson nods with vocal inflections reminding of 80s icon Mylène Farmer (mostly on “Ce monde où tu n’existes pas”), or even forays into much slower territories like dub on “Aimer sur le long terme”.
Fortunately, that kind of incursion into very different genres feels coherent within the record, thanks to Fernandez’s gorgeous voice that acts as a common theme. It also always works because the duo is not only showing off their eclectic tastes: they are genuinely great songwriters capable of crafting the most immediate banger and slow tunes that will eventually crawl into their listeners’ minds. These memorable melodies constitute quite a unique proposition when coupled with gabber’s balls-to-the-walls intensity; you usually sing or dance hard, but you rarely do both simultaneously. And when these straightforward lyrics hide some self-empowering layers, they become intensely powerful.
That whole package works wonderfully in a live setting, and Ascendant Vierge know that very well, as they put a live version of the previously released track “Petit Soldat” at the end of the record. “Petit Soldat” is a testimony of the duo’s stamina, the sheer power of their
boom-boom, and how they can actually leverage the live setting to propel their tunes to even hyper heights - Seul backing Fernandez’s vocals gives the whole lot even more anthemic energy. With such an explosive musical cocktail, relatable lyrics, and exposure the band is starting to draw, there is no doubt that they will soon establish themselves as European festival powerhouses.
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