A week before our visit, at the beginning of March, Marlon Magnée refurbished his living-dining room with a large bay window overlooking Ivry-sur-Seine. Cables, synthesizers, microphones that made the room feel like a rehearsal studio were camouflaged under Afghan blankets in the adjoining room. “It was time for it to become an adult lounge! “ laughs the co-founder of La Femme, barely in his thirties.
Against a background of three wallpapers (flight of storks, mauve flowers, green foliage), an eccentric profusion of fish from the abyss, blue mage’s head, wigs (shared between the singer and his Australian dancer friend), lava lamps, paintings ” tim-burtoniens ”and unidentified objects still rub shoulders with rock and exotic guitars, upright piano and vintage keyboards.
The same goes for the new album of La Femme as for the apartment of the co-founder of the group. Despite the very serious title of this third opus – Paradigms (published on April 2) -, and the apparent “maturity” of certain texts (“If we refer to nihilist thought and tragic philosophers, we better understand the dizzying insignificance of our lives”, in Disconnection), the group that rekindled the flame of French-speaking pop at the dawn of the 2010s does not renounce a creative effervescence mixing youthful instinct and baroque brewing.
As in Psycho Tropical Berlin (2013) and Mystery (2016), we find in Paradigms a mix of surf music, underground yéyé, electro-pop, French cold wave, hip-hop, psychedelia or punk. A cocktail also enriched with multiple inspirations: oriental volutes (Go), Hispanic melancholy (The garden) or American references (Cool Colorado, New Orleans, Pasadena).
Winks supported by western music (Let go of horses), a banjo ace (Randal Morton, recorded in Memphis, for a goofy solo in Disconnection) and unusual brass explosions (Paradigm, Cool Colorado). “We invited musicians from the High Society Jazz Band, a French New-Orleans group created by my grandfather, and taken over, upon his death, by my mother ”, explains Marlon.
“From the start, we realized that a lot of our songs were prettier with girlish voices. Maybe because we struggled to assume, as singers and authors, our share of femininity. ” Wife
A variable geometry group, La Femme has tightened around its hard core, even if the duo, who had met in a high school in Biarritz, now work remotely. «After having lived in Paris, Sacha returned to live in the Basque Country, specifies his friend installed in the 9-4. It’s a bit more complicated, but we’ve always used to work separately, like two solo projects that would bring their efforts together on a regular basis. “
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