Critic's evaluation
It is the third album by La Théorie Des Cordes and comes 12 years after their debut album Première Vibrations. Its creation began on a full moon night in early August 2022. Born from La Mercery, a studio located in Mirepoix, a town in the Occitaine region, comes 4U 9525.
The icy wind blows with a relatively sharp force. The leaves fall easily from the trees and are lost in the dark horizon of the stormy night. While these rough blows generate the sonar of a dissonant whistle, inside a hovel there is a blank stare drying the gloomy landscape through the window. There is no rationality in a mind disconnected from reality, and yet, from the eyes, big tears of mute and enigmatic suffering fall. This is what Stéphanie Artaud's piano shows with its low notes and dramatic pauses, which are soon joined by a bass with bass lines. Designed by Mathieu Torres, these lines emerge with a delicate fullness like a character offering shelter from an uncontrollable cry. A touch of sensitivity to a painful torment of still unknown origin, but already perceptible coming from inside the character. In the midst of a lancinating melancholy, the tinkling of the dome of Heiva Arnal's drums' driving cymbal already begins to propose a new landscape, a receptive scenario for hope and overcoming. It is with sweetness and sensitivity, built through the fusion between post-rock and jazz under the jam session perspective, that Yyc - Blanc De Calgary emerges as a linear dialogue that walks from chaos to emotional plenitude, the breaking of the unhealthy relationship between heart and suffering that suggests new possibilities for making the new tomorrow.
The same tone of melancholy begins to build a new body. Still grayish in landscape, but with a more comforting softness, Hkg - Cancer D'Ete, comes with a swing that tries to disguise the suffering. Flowing into phrases of aesthetics connotatively coming from jazz, the song brings a better tasting rhythmic cadence. Still, Hkg - Cancer D'Ete seems to provide a kind of funeral and numbing waltz in which the melodic character dances to the sound of his own uncontrollable death on a stream of frozen water on the surface of a river lost among Nordic forests. The whitish velvet does not hide his pain, but the shimmering of the fabric in the symphony of the wind carries his grief in a kind of purification of the mind for the arrival to the beyond, to the unknown world of the afterlife.
Providing purposeful echoes, the drums are the ones who pull the introduction with a groove in which the protagonism falls on the opaque sound of the box stems, responsible for bringing texture to the intoxicating linear monotony of the melody. The proposal that emerges here, however, offers a generous and purposeful tone of reflection, despite its contagious cadence. Gaining more power through a new subdivision, Lax - La Mort Du Buddhiste now has a rhythmic tempo well marked by the drums. In a broad way, it is curious to see how the song, with a remarkable escape from the hypnotic melancholic environment, ends up flirting with the energy and clothing of Last Ride In, a Green Day song, not because of the punk aspect, but for the lightness and serenity with which it suggests a new environment. Even for this reason, Lax - La Mort Du Buddhiste brings good notions of an embryonic progressive sound that cooperates with the maturation of what can be called another phase in the life of the character of 4U 9525.
Dense, the introduction brings a suspenseful flavor hitherto unseen. Capable of causing uncontrollable chills, this curious change builds from the entrance of a sonar capable of mixing treble and bass in the same note. The way Hugo Lemercier's mandolin moves suggests the unknown, which, in itself, generates insecurity and attracts the listener's attention, who can already see his pupils dilated and his hair standing on end as if he were alert. When the drums appear with precision in the fluidity of its jazz phrases, it is that Alp - Le Colosse D'Anatolie shows itself as the phases of the reconstruction of the character's life. Far from her latent sufferings of Hkg - Cancer D'Ete, she now finds herself in control of her emotions and, above all, her own destiny. Even if insecure on the outside, she comes with a boiling blood that makes her unreasonably imposing. Still, Alp - Le Colosse D'Anatolie features dramatic, bluesy, progressive romps that represent the unexpected and the plots of life in this process of overcoming pain.
Repicada, the phrase that Arnal chose to sound the dawn of the new setting is embedded in a funk base full of swing. Amidst the low piano notes, which give a more palpable sonar to the rhythm, the listener can get lost in the audio-sensitive memories of the iconic intro of In The End, Linkin Park's single, even if it happens only through the tone of the keys. Coming out of that memory, the listener finds himself in an icy environment that suggests the search for more intense elements to bring the feeling of liveliness, something that from the very beginning of 4U 9525 is the focus of the character. Syncopated, Cdg - Need For Speed parades a bulging mood that goes beyond the sound and ends up infecting the listener in an organic and gradual way.
It is chaos. The true face of an unstable emotional that is in constant friction with the real world. It is the relapse, the attempts to forget the suffering once and for all and to have, at least for a few moments, the false idea of being free of the pain. The agony. The peace desperately sought and achieved in a sudden rush of torpor that quiets the mind, frees the spirit, and calms the heart. This is the setting of ??? - Les Lois De L'Attraction.
After the thud, comes the awakening process and the realization of the consequences of the act previously chosen. From the darkness, what becomes clear is only the overflight of sparks coming from nowhere, just like the memory being erased. It is at this moment that comes the will for the total reassumption of consciousness, a cut-off instant that is defined by the despair and latent affliction of no longer being able to return to that life once known. Representing this chaos and anguish, Dba - Les Grands Hotels is governed by a rhythmic break that moves from slowtempo to a mixture of midtempo and hightempo. After all, while the drums move in a kind of uncontrollable agony, the piano follows with its punctual notes and dramatic pauses until it manages to position itself as the sound of the character's unsuccessful attempts to regain bodily consciousness.
Melancholy resurfaces with a high degree of protagonism, but, different from how it was in Yyc - Blanc De Calgary, here it comes without pain, but regret. Regret for not having tried harder. Regret for not having asked for help as soon as possible. Regret for having chosen to go before the stay and fight for her well-being. However, even if there is a certain degree of sadness, Bcn - Terminale Envolee sounds like a kind of generalization of the feeling of forgiveness and, mainly, gratitude for the good moments that life once offered. No wonder that the harmony between drums, bass, and piano results in something more floral and not so sad and somber.
The sound is sour, but sweet at the same time. It is like being in an unimaginable environment of plenitude. It is peace, absolute torpor. This is how Dus - Il Ne Restera Rien, under the silhouette of the mellotron, shows itself to the listener. A new way to see the end, without chaos, fear, brutality, or aggression. Only the resigned awareness that the present is focused on the afterlife. The end of the past and the beginning of a new future.
It is the path from chaos to torpor. It is a linear dialogue whose sonority is soaked in suffering and maximum melancholy, and which accompanies a character to the acquisition of his maximum well-being from a tragic attitude, of immediate result. What La Théorie Des Cordes proposes with 4U 9525 is the path taken by an intense state of sadness until the sudden censure of pain.
In this respect, it is even possible to note familiarities with the work done by PsicosFeras in Suarabácti, after all, in both cases the melodic characters are lost in a state of intense suffering that hides any sign of consciousness. The only difference between both dialogues is that, in the second, the option was for the struggle to get rid of the chaos, and in 4U 9525, it was the immediate repression of martyrdom.
The most interesting thing in this process is to note the importance of the electric guitar in each of the album's nine chapters. Responsible for giving the last word to each sigh, the instrument has a notable importance in amplifying the drama of 4U 9525, is only perceptible on a second hearing. And it is at this instant that the listener notices the way it sonorizes the agony, the mercy, the anger, the heartfelt cry. With dissonant phrases and deep progressive dips, it manages to capture, in sound and intensity, the chaos and despair of the last moments of a life suddenly ended.
In the present material, inclusive, La Théorie Des Cordes' option to print the proper weight in order to authentically understand the emotions of a melodic character was to fuse notions of progressive, ambient, post-rock, funk, and jazz, a genre that predominated in a large part of the sound bases.
This is how intense 4U 9525 sounded with its lightness. Thanks to Lemercier, who, in addition to being a mandolin player and guitarist, also divided himself between the functions of producer and mixing engineer. Perhaps because he was even part of the creative team, the professional was able to imprint even more original and authentic feelings to the proposed plot. Besides, he made sure that the album was finished with a crystal clear sound, which allowed the listener to taste each emotion.
Closing the technical scope of the album comes the cover art. Signed by Stéphanie, it consists of a photograph that represents chaos, disorganization, heterogeneity, inconstancy and disorder. In the middle of a green forest full of pine trees with vivid greenish leaves, a plane breaks the symmetry of a synchronous picture. And that is the idea of chaos proposed in 4U 9525.
Released on 04/21/2023 via Luminol Records, 4U 9525 is a material that sounds dense in its morbid softness. Visceral, it is material that makes pain transcend notes and keys. A work that, while intoxicating in the way it illustrates suffering, shows that even after drastic measures, it is possible to achieve well-being and fullness of spirit. 4U 9525 is simply the perfect sensory-sounding rendition of the plane crash that inspired its nomenclature.
