Film Noir release an album that’s deeply cinematic with ‘PALPITANT’
Borrowing heavily from their native France, Film Noir forge a distinctly European-sounding record on Palpitant, an impressively realised debut that opens a portal into the world of post-Brexit rock. The most striking thing about Palpitant is the accessibility, especially as it’s sung in French language, as if plunging listeners back to the days when France Gall and Serge Gainsbourg lit the world up with their jaunty tunes about little nothings enjoyed on the side of France.
Bandleader Josephine De La Baume has a talent for crafting stories that are rich with yearning and pathos, like the frenzied rush of ‘Erotica’ and the slow, shimmering waltz of ‘Histoire d’un soir’. However, the band can also build grand, muscular soundscapes that wash over the audience, as is evident from the quietly brilliant ‘Circus’. Although the album doesn’t break any new ground from a compositional point of view, it exudes confidence and character — not least through the melancholia that swallows the listeners from the barrelling intro to the quiet, crisp evocative nature of the last piece.
What connects these disparate strands is the general sense of helplessness, as if giving in to the primal urges of love and lust, investing the songs with dream-like weariness and fatigue. It’s an album built on intellectual acumen, but that’s not to say that the songs shift along with the pace of a Wim Wenders film. Film Noir are cinephiles, but their tastes gear toward the mainstream, laced with a longing for the aestheticism it has on display. It’s somewhere between Stanley Kubrick and Neil Jordan, and the band achieve this standing by way of their presentation.
The minimalism of ‘Pen Palpitant’ quickly makes way for the propulsive, pummelling backdrop of ‘Narcisse’, demonstrating the band’s fondness for contrast and condition. While the sound of the album recalls the cerebral epics of the 20th century, the band’s pop-oriented passion and endearing appropriation of their environment make it enjoyable to listen to on the first go.
Coincidentally, the album’s embrace of chamber pop helps usher in a revival Yé-yé music, which is also heard in Martina Stoessel’s output. They aren’t the first to embrace the Yé-yé renaissance (Fontaines D.C. have been tipping their hat at the genre, particularly on the longing of their excellent debut Dogrel), but they might be one of the more successful at tying their own stamp on the cultural movement that launched in the 1960s.
The album is celebratory, offering vignettes of a life spent imbibing the richness, the contrast and the textures that a city as grand and as expansive as Paris can offer. It leaps under the weight of a fizzing, furious guitar hook, while the drums thunder away with sultry aplomb and elegance.
The band are out to prove themselves as musicians, especially on the sonic achievements of ‘Prends la pierre’, one of the album’s richer experiments in studio craft. Yes, the album is cinematic, and it’s about time someone brought the landscape out of the lingering.
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