When you don’t know a band and you arrive the night when they have decided to come up with something original, it’s a weird experience and it makes even more difficult for you to figure out who they really are about..
Fol Chen has a Monday residency in August at the echo in LA, and for their 3rd night, they had invited 10 people recruited on Craiglist, that they had never met or rehearsed with, to sing their songs. A sort of Craiglist idol or Karaoke-Echo, depending on how you see things, but they had announced they were going to choose one of them to be their new lead singer. It is unclear to me if they did effectively select someone at the end.
May be it was not the best night to see the band, but next week they will invite a metal group, Viscera, to perform their songs, so it does not seem to be the right date either.
Only four Fol Chen members out of the six appeared in assorted red jumpsuits, inviting one by one the 10 happy selected to join them on stage.
Why do they do that? Is their music not strong enough? And do they need to attract the attention on some other trick? You have to wonder…
So I was left with these songs interpreted by all these courageous people to get an idea of what NPR described as dark and whimsical.
The comparison with Prince’s funk pop sounds is unavoidable but there is so much more and overall Fol Chen’s sound is tricky to describe. There’s a Prince cover on their myspace, but also a Pink Floyd’s cover, not exactly the same beast, so go figure! I just had the feeling I was stepping in a universe I would not be able to figure out so fast, and it will take me much more than this little Karaoke session at the Echo to have a clear idea of their music.
There are a lot of electronic beeps, synthesizers hiccups, dreams of New Wave, but there are also eerie acoustic guitar ballads, danceable numbers, lamenting trumpets,… their songs are so all over the place.
Fol Chen cultivates weirdness and eccentricity, since they were always appearing masked at the beginning of their career, trying to hide their faces in photographs and videos, with cryptic information on their website. On Monday night they were unmasked, unlike their music.
The show was nevertheless interesting, and with a new person on stage for every song, everybody’s face was showing the opposite of boredom, cheering up people, encouraging them, flattering the pretty women, laughing at the jokes; well, some people can get very comfortable on stage right away! And most of them, if not all, were pretty good considering they hadn’t rehearsed.
Strange, and almost familial, the ambiance was very friendly as they were thanking and hugging each singer at the end of each song, contrasting with the cryptic half Nabokov’s tale, half post-apocalyptic tale concept behind the band that still escapes me.