Chocolat Billy - Le Feu Au Lac LP

Chocolat Billy - Le Feu Au Lac LP (Kythibong/France )

IMPORTANT: Coming from France, the corners of the record jackets got a tiny bit dinged.

Limited to 500

They Say:

In french, one can say that "the lake isn’t on fire", meaning that there is no rush. But what would a lake on fire look like? This new Chocolat Billy album, as its title announces, tries to picture it. The urgency is there, it is hounding us, informing, spreading, but it is embroiled in a “danceable solution” as Brian Ferry would have said in the days of Roxy Music. With Chocolat Billy, we don't dance in circles, we travel in dreams in half-built landscapes. Jacques seems to be blowing in his tuba, which one imagines to be a little dusty, and this simple movement of air is
transformed into a note on the sax leading the path from the cave to the river.
Besides Jacques, (we will not know what happened to his various partners that we encountered in a previous album), we come across several families of figures. Où vas-tu Zolatale? "Au Cinéma" seems to answer the following title. And it is Italy on the Cinecittà side that we visit to the rhythm of a shimmering afro-beat, taking the time to salute the great Mario Bava, then a Mediterranean California of acid-synth Beach Boys. We enter in a huge apartment reminiscent of a tango, not Piazzolla's but Zbigniew Rybczyński's film. We even dance in the dark following a reptilian progression, disregarding the angles and walls that our swaying hips might encounter. And above all, we don't dance alone. We do not shuffle; the tracks move forward, compact, on their sustained rhythms, but one can linger to whistle the Orientologist. The fire in the lake does not create a bubble and does not give in to panic, it is crossed by colored and sinuous lines which intertwine supplely but can sometimes break abruptly as the design of the cover suggests. "Scutigères flamboyantes vs rats de bureau versus", this intense text found on a flyer
at Novö Local, an underground concert venue in Bordeaux, seems to have drifted to finally find its place in the band's music. One can imagine that other materials that make their music so rich were picked up along the way, kept aside, waiting for the right moment to use them, this little nothings, like Jacques with his found mask which is a bit old. Whether for dance or for life, there is an urgent need to keep your feet on the ground. And if you catch yourself looking at your shoes, it's not "shoegazing" but it's to check that they will hold up.

We Say:

I don't own a pool or live near a beach, but the opening seconds of Le Feu Au Lac has me feeling like you are splashing in a cooling scintillating surf. The vacation for the ears continues as synths slip and slide, melodies bounce like a beachball on the surface of the water, and whistles cheerfully lead you down winding roads on what sounds like the back of a very fast scooter. Circular afro-pop rhythms bump up against guitar lines intended for secret agents in tropical climates and you can practically feel the humidity warming your skin as the record progresses. Chocolat Billy will have you craving salt air, open roads, cocktails served in coconuts, and a black tie event in a Mediterranean casino that ends with the bad guys getting theirs, fireworks decorating the sky, and a lingering kiss that tastes of an evening that ends as the sun comes peaking over the horizon. If a vacation is not an affordable option for you this summer, this record delivers the something nearly as pleasing to the ears.