Ça Va Cogner WB rating out of 100

Ça Va Cogner is the ideal accompaniment for talking with a jaunty French foreign legionnaire named Emilé while sitting in a bar in Panama smoking cigars and drinking punch served in a coconut. In short, it’s succinctly cinematic, somewhat sophisticated and a little bit clichéd.

Feu Thérèse, out of Montreal, seemingly the new Mecca of indie music, is an eclectic and intriguing group, made up of guitarist and performance artist Jonathan Parrant (formerly of fellow Constellation labelmates Fly Pan Am), prolific experimentalist bass player Alexandre St. Onge, composer and sound artist Stephen De Oliveira and drummer/artist Luc Paradis. The album opens up at a dashing pace, the first track ‘A Nos Amours’ is a delightful post-folk exploration of harmony and instrumental blending, with lead vocals sung in French (as throughout the album) at almost a whisper. Ça Va Cogner could be seen as one of the first albums directly influenced by Arcade Fire’s 2007 juggernaut Neon Bible: in the use of organ on ‘A Nos Amours’, the string openings of the title track and ‘Le Nuit Est Une Femme’ and the chiming and grinding dual guitars of ‘Les Enfants’. However Ça Va Cogner is not derivative, but showing the use of this broad range of instruments at a more leisurely pace, lacks the fervent, sometime overzealous, fanaticism of Neon Bible.

However the overall pace of the album does fluctuate, and towards the end of the album, on tracks such as ‘Ferrari en Feu (Part 2)’ and ‘Le nuit est une femme’, keys and choral vocals are used to build the album to a dark and brooding crescendo, with its synthesizers and mournful guitar channeling artists as disparate as Kurt Cobain (from his collaborations with seminal beat writer William S. Burroughs), New Order, David Bowie and perhaps even Meat Loaf on a particularly epic day. Indeed the superbly controlled use of synthesizers, bass and keys on these tracks, combined with the haunting vocals and harmonies bring about a real change in tone at the end of the album, as the playful style of parts of the first half of the album is dropped for a more dramatic, affecting manner.

Although Ça Va Cogner is not a particularly exciting album (and nor is it supposed to be, as it is really all about the build up of instrumentation and expectation over time) it manages to keep you listening with its interesting and innovative combinations of unique genre-bending movements.

For all its solidity, Ça Va Cogner is a flawed output: at times rampantly repetitive, at times frivolous and quite often unnecessary instruments are used, leaving the listener asking ‘what am I listening to?’. While clearly an experimental album, Ça Va Cogner would have benefited from a little less of the same, and the artists, all clearly talented and inventive, expressing themselves with less ardor and pomp and more integrity. Ça Va Cogner has a compromised feel to it when viewed as a whole and this is the central flaw, as it seems as though Feu Thérèse have, in trying to fit in every possible influence, made somewhat a mess of an interesting premise.