I usually don't like to give too much credit to the title of their album when it comes to understanding and interpreting the specifics themes expressed through their music. I usually like to think of such monikers as separate, if complementary elements, of their over all presentation. However, when it comes to Fievel Is Glauque and their debut album God's Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess, I think collapsing their name, album title, and sound into a single discussion is warranted. Fievel Is Glauque is organized around the central performances of multi-instrumentalist Zach Phillips and vocalist Marie-Amélie Clément-Bollée. For their debut, they've collaborated with around thirty musicians, during five separate recordings sessions that literally span the globe. The assembled masterpiece is a messy mosaic of jazz, French mid-century pop, and soul that is beautiful and comfortingly familiar, and yet manages to tumble into the clasp of uncanny.
When listening to God's Trashmen, you'll want to forgive yourself for receiving the impression that you've heard these songs before. Like they were somehow part of your childhood, or like they are erupting from the memory of a past life. A lot of these sounds have not found purchase with the broader culture since France Gall and Scott Walker were marque-worthy pop stars. Through Fievel Is Glauque, we find these sounds the recapitulation with a kind of jazz fusion, ripped from a different timeline, performed in the haze of a loving derangement that echos the sense of fungible reality that can be found swirling within the iris of Wayne Coyne's or Roky Erickson artistic visions. This is the essence of the overlap between album title and sound. Fievel Is Glauque takes abandoned forms of previously chic and culturally relevant pop music, uproots them from the post-war consensus from which they flowered, and repots them in the rancid blood and batter acid-rich soil of the twenty-first century, and then fertilizes these struggling dandies with a couple of handfuls of no-wave miracle gro pilfered from Neu!'s grave. There was a time back in the '60s when people truly believed that if you unleashed people's emotions and allowed them to feel without inhibitions or analysis of their motives, that the problems of the world would essentially solve themselves. Love would win, as you still so often hear. But that world made this world possible, and I think few would argue that our present reality is the one that past idealists hoped to one day realize.
Fievel Is Glauque literally take the trash of these past civilizational efforts and dumps them all over the floor of your living room. They then invite you to sit with them in the middle of the heap to sort through it all of this stinking detritus to figure out where all this junk came from and talk about where this landslide of debris is leading us. Listening to God's Trashmen feels like buying a ticket to a classic Disney feature film presented in its original aspect ratio and resolution, but upon wandering into the cinema, finding yourself in an operating theater, now with a front-row seat to a horrifying surgical error and act of malpractice. Fievel Is Glauque will show you all the dead ends of our culture and its costly miscarriages. It's up to you to figure out what to do with the information for which you are now the woefully the trustee.
