Etron Fou Leloublan - Batelages

Back to mainland Europe and one of the first groups of bands invited by Henry Cow to join the Rock in Opposition festival--France's Etron Fou Leloublan.  Along with the recent Zappa post, this album is a great example of one of the common trade-offs found in experimental rock: if you want to hear some unorthodox ideas, don't expect the album to be uniformly coherent.  As much as I obsess over the album-as-ultimate-pop-music-artistic-statement, I also acknowledge that the effort it takes to produce unique musical ideas is often so creatively taxing that the band seems to have little energy left to expend attentively cultivating their album's big picture--flow, connectedness, uniformly high quality, or even the strength of the individual songs wherein the unique ideas reside.  As a result, some experimental albums turn out to be confused messes, while some more successful ones still tend to come across as good but wildly scattershot and inaccessibly eclectic (to some, at least).  This reality makes the truly great experimental albums full of truly great ideas so rare that they're like precious diamonds to behold.  In pursuit of that elusive ideal, though, I've found a need to shift my expectations when listening to experimental music from album consistency to subjectively evaluating the presence and quality of interesting ideas.  In other words, it can be just as entertaining to listen to a group attempt and not fully succeed at doing something that's never quite been done before as it is to listen to an artist make a thoroughly great album in a style that's already been done a million times.  What better music to illustrate this experience than Etron Fou Leloublan's 1977 debut, Batelages?

The group is surely one of the most curious of RIO outfits, consisting of just a drummer, a saxophonist and a bassist who occasionally plays guitar.  Their roots are unique within RIO too, sounding much less like Henry Cow and with more of a performance art/dance hall vibe.  The epic tracks that bookend the album demonstrate quite well the relative success and failure of an experimental approach, with "L'Amulette et le Petit Rabbin" showcasing all of the group's strengths in one long narrative.  The track opens with acoustic guitar, abruptly shifting to a punk rock-like blast of electric guitar, drums and raw but playful vocals that initiate the ironic tale of the titular "little Rabbi."  The ensuing 14 or so minutes blend the band's ribald humor and vocal/poetic acting with hypnotically interlocking bass and drum figures (probably their strongest characteristic) and cabaret-like saxophone melodies.  The story is pretty absurd and funny, but there's enough feeling in the vocals and musical depth to hold the interest of non-Francophones--like when the beat changes around 9 minutes from dance hall striptease music to bass chording and stutter-stop drum interplay.  While some may prefer more smoothness and dovetailed segues between the different sections of music, I really enjoy the immediacy and surprise that comes when the band jaggedly and instantaneously changes gears from one mood to another.  And if there was any question regarding whether or not you can play difficult, complex music and still enjoy it, just listen to the last two minutes!

Conversely, "Histoire de Graine" offers another longform statement that is much less impressive.  While the narrative elements are still strong, the ideas are fewer and further between, with considerably more repetition.  The vocalist (I'm not sure whether it's saxophonist Chris Chanet or bassist Ferdinand Richard) is considerably tamer than the first track's, and things tend to drag with less energy and more of a feeling of musical stagnation.  Still, it becomes apparent that the goal of the song is a cacophonous crescendo.  While not the most economical ratio of ideas to minutes, the build-up is not necessarily unsuccessful.  In the middle of the two epics we're treated to a solo percussion performance and a 30 second saxophone-led instrumental (both of which reinforce the band's circus-like image) and the fascinating instrumental "Madame Richard/Larika," which features a doubletracked, almost avant-classical bass intro and more of the noisy trio grooves that make the first track one of the best.  Probably the most carefully-composed piece, it's also easier to grasp the relationship between the band's freer and more aggressive tendencies and their inklings as composers.

Like a lot of the uncommercial bands that made up RIO, Etron Fou Leloublan's albums play like snapshots of what they were doing live at the time; they're not so much carefully crafted studio statements (indeed evident by the charmingly lo-fi production) as they are attempts to document the achievements of a group trying (and sometimes succeeding) at combining disparate crazy elements in one place and having a great time doing it.  Though their later albums shed some of the feral energy found here, I'm happy we have both sides of the band documented in order to compare unbridled and spontaneous creativity with a more refined and thoughtful take on some of the same ideas.  When it comes to the tension between searching for perfect albums and interesting ideas, I think this one has enough inspiration to make it worth listening to and keeping in spite of tenuously gelling as a good album--chaos is often beautiful in its own way!

Get it here.