Fol Chen is a strange oddity really hard to figure out: I had already seen them during this summer and I was not exactly sure of what to do with their unexpected harmonies, jerky rhythms and moody eclectic songs. Their music may be interesting at times with its surprising funky-electronic-pop hiccup but I was not entirely convinced by their eccentricity, especially because that night they were trying something new and were pretending auditioning for a new singer.
They were opening for Fujiya & Maiyagi at the Echo on Sunday night and the five of them came on stage in red matching jumpsuits, without their usual frontman Samuel Bing, who was nevertheless hanging around in the room.
I ended up liking some of their songs much more than other ones,… probably because they are so different in style and could go from sweet harmonies, to weirdness and discordance, to broken fanfares and Talking Heads robotic moves, to sinister darkness, among many other things.
If I didn’t care for the vague R&B influence of ‘C/U’, or for the Devo-esque ‘They came to me’, I enjoyed the weird melody of ‘Winter, That’s all’ with its fierce beat-synth combination and vocal harmonies only repeating ‘Lately, I don't feel so hot/Could it be the summer/Turning into fall’, or the summery ‘No Wedding Cake’ with its silly ending proclaiming, ‘you're just a dick to me/you won't get no wedding cake’ over a toy-like keyboard.
During 'The Idiot', Patrick, one of the singers, sang ‘Everybody here thinks I’m an idiot/everybody here can’t stop laughing’, an interesting line considering the overall atmosphere of their set.
Sure, there is a lot of silliness in all this, the matching outfits, the deliberate all-over-the place-music style, the obvious desire to sound folksy-artsy or just plain weird, mixing genres, making collage-samplings … and you end up wondering how could they still build hooks in this messy maze? But they can,… most of the time.
They performed some of their most famous songs like ‘Cable TV’, a desire of escape with a lover in a desert motel with a strange idea of some sordid sexuality ‘Won't you come away with me/The carpets filthy but the ice is free/You know I just got paid/So we can order Pay-Per-View/If nothing's good on TV’, sang over a playful toyish keyboard, the curious sounding ‘In Ruins’, which seemed to be a photo montage, before closing their set with ‘The Holograms’ and its conflicting harmonies, sounding more enigmatic than ever.
I haven’t forgotten that their first album, ‘Part I: John Shade, Your Fortune's Made’, vaguely evokes the hero from the labyrinthic Nabokov’s novel ‘Pale Fire’, but if the exact connection still remains obscure, they may just want to cultivate the mysterious and the complex.