Fans of rock, folk and tangy pop will meet on Friday to soak up the sun at Entrepôt 77, an industrial space “in a green setting” dedicated “to music, creation and to discovery” which runs along the railway, near the Van Horne overpass.
A superb place operated by the good people of Pop Montreal, who entrusted the programmers of the Distorsion festival with the mandate to furnish the weekend with a poster of their own, which notably brings together the Torontonians of Holy Fuck, the group “moccasingaze” Zoon , Gus Englehorn, N Nao and this fresh new punk-new wave band made up of members of Choses Sauvages, Jesuslesfilles and Laurence-Anne.
No need for a giant telescope to observe the birth of this new star: it is called La Sécurité.
After having released their first two solid songs in the infinite space of the Web last May, the group is about to offer their very first concert in life. It will be grand! “It may be our last,” jokes Éliane Viens-Synnott, author, composer, singer and keyboardist.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it a “supergroup”, “although on a Montreal scale, a microcosm doesn’t mean much”, retorts modestly Félix Bélisle, singer, keyboardist and bass player for the excellent disco- electro Choses Sauvages, who first imagined this new project as a duet with Éliane, his girlfriend. “We all played in different projects,” says the ex-drummer of the Vanille orchestra, in which Mélissa Di Menna, singer, guitarist and keyboardist of La Sécurité also played.
The last member is named Kenny Smith, drummer-multi-instrumentalist, “a mind-blowing young musician, very stylish, a little guy who came from the suburbs of Guelph and looks like Bowie”, who inspired a song (still unreleased) by La Sécurité named Waiting for Kenny. The guy that Félix took under his wing – he made his solo microalbum – had arrived late for one of their rehearsals, he who manages two jobs to earn a living, including one at the bar L’Esco. “And Laurence-Anne, we’ve known each other for a long time, we go camping and we play softball together,” says Bélisle, who collaborated with the songwriter for her cover of the song. good in nothing by Ariane Moffatt who appears on the anniversary edition of the album Aquanaut.
“We picked up all these beautiful people together to make music! continues Felix. And how does it sound? Like Devo, first of all, one of Eliane’s many musical passions, right down to the absurd dimension of the texts of the mythical American punk-electro group. “Our texts are often playful and absurd, that’s how I like to write. Devo shaped me so much when I was a teenager, the influence stayed with me,” says Éliane, while her boyfriend praises her pen when she writes in English (Éliane grew up in Western Canada).
The Devo sound jumps out on the song suspensewhereas try again (the group is cooking up a first bilingual album) is more amorphous, the drums and the guitar giving substance to Éliane’s words, not without evoking the visionary minimalism of the New York funk-rock-rap group ESG, of the Scroggins sisters.
Éliane says she wanted to play music standing up rather than sitting behind the drums for a change, Félix wanted to not be the singer of the project “and just playing bass backwards, that’s good “. And to concoct grooves a bit rougher than those he develops with his colleagues from Choses Sauvages. “And I really like having the role of director — with Choses Sauvages, we work with several different directors. There, I feel that I have another form of control. It’s another musical flavor that I had in me and that I wanted to explore in a new project”, led by Éliane, the punk impulse of the sound of La Sécurité. “Éliane makes me listen to Crass in the car! said Felix with a laugh.
The Distorsion festival will kick off at 5 p.m. Friday, and will continue from 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Holy Fuck (Friday, 9 p.m.), Golden Dawn Arkestra (Saturday) and the curious Swiss from the Orchester Almighty Marcel Duchamp (Sunday) headline. Security will be on stage at 7 p.m. Sunday.