Wow! French Nancy has invented time travel. Okay, not quite, but they do make music that takes me right back to a time and a place. It’s the early eighties. I’m in a small venue in the Thames Valley, and through the dry ice (whose distinctive smell is almost perceptible as I sit and write this), black-clad purveyors of post-punk power can be glimpsed, and the beats and grooves such as those found on “The Vow” bounce off the smoke-stained, sweat-soaked walls of the room.
That’s just my experience; I’m sure that there is a whole wave of younger people whose own personal metaphorical time machine will drop them off decades later and set them down in the front row of a Motorama, Black Marble or Topographies gig, but, it’s the same argument.
Driving on a pre-pop Cure groove that is both digital and delicious, full of anxiety and fractiousness, they take that early gothic (for want of a better term) coolness (in every sense of the world) and reshape it for the modern age. Guitars shimmer and shine through the beat, bass lines drop depth-charge pulses, and synths soar as man and machine make beautiful music together.
And as much as French Nancy nod to the sounds of the past, the cyclical and circular nature of music means that as much as they look back, they are also pointing the way forward to a whole new scene and sound, one that is both familiar and fresh, nostalgic and forward-thinking.
