French connection

>>Pas Chic Chic draw big bilingual crowds
with a deep, dark European approach
to pop, which they’ve captured on the
debut album Au Contraire

DE SOUCHE MAIS FAROUCHE: Pas Chic Chic (L to R)
Roger Tellier-Craig, Marie-Douce St. Jacques,
Éric Fillion, Radwan Moumneh, Éric Gingras

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“Personally, I hate it,” says Roger Tellier-Craig, wincing at the memory of the festival sets that Pas Chic Chic played last summer. As much fun as festivals can be for the crowds, it’s a steep challenge for most musicians to really reach an audience from a huge outdoor stage in the sun. And particularly so for independent musicians with punk and post-rock backgrounds, wearing uniform turtlenecks and sunglasses.

The quintet took on the big gigs for the sole purpose of toughening up, and they needed it, having played very few of the routine gigs that emerging local bands tend to. They recorded most of their debut album Au Contraire (out next week on Semprini Records) before they began playing live, and the transition from a world-class studio (Hotel2Tango) to your average bar’s sound system was not an easy one. But they quickly adapted to the stress, having already paid their dues.

Most members of Pas Chic Chic have long histories on the local scene, albeit playing music far removed the Gallic pop-opera they specialize in now. Over the past decade and some, Tellier-Craig co-founded Fly Pan Am, Set Fire to Flames and Et Sans, and played with godspeed you! black emperor; bassist Éric Gingras was also a member of Fly Pan Am, accompanied DJ/producer Ghislain Poirier, and continues to work with Cian Ethrie; drummer Éric Fillion was part of punk bands Cobra Noir, the Black Hand and IRE; guitarist Radwan Moumneh is primarily known as a manager and engineer at Hotel2Tango, though he also played with the hardcore band Cursed, and leads Jerusalem in My Heart, a solo project with an extended family of guests. Keyboardist/singer Marie-Douce St. Jacques’s one live performance prior to Pas Chic Chic was with Moumneh, alongside Gingras and Fillion, who coincidentally cameo-ed at the same show. “I sang for the first time in my life,” she says, “a Johnny Cash song called ‘One Piece at a Time,’ really softly. No one heard me.”

Blood, sweat, fears

When the Mirror last convened with Tellier-Craig, the band had already tested their mettle at the St-Viateur street fest, and were bracing themselves for even bigger crowds at Francofolies and Osheaga. But they’ve played equally strange small gigs, such as a surprise early-morning set at the private school where Fillion used to teach—“700 screaming girls,” recalls St. Jacques, selecting it as her scariest gig to date. They were also the first (and one of the last) bands to play live at Lab Synthèse, Mile-End’s briefly ballyhooed party loft.

“Did you hear about the window?” asks Gingras. “Someone fell down the stairs and went right through it. When I arrived there, I saw a human shape in the glass and someone wiping up blood underneath.”

“That was perfect,” says Tellier-Craig, referring to the gig, not the accident—which wasn’t fatal, by the way. “That was a blast. I like small, sweaty, dark places.”

Just the kind of suggestive statement you’d expect from a follower of Serge Gainsbourg and Jarvis Cocker, two of Pas Chic Chic’s patron singer-songwriter-perverts. A strong vocal similarity links Tellier-Craig to the latter, while the Gainsbourg effect is more profound—the band’s G-spot, if you will.

“Aesthetically, that whole [’60s and ’70s] era was really important, but it does come back to Gainsbourg for me because of his approach to music and the kind of ugly personality that he was, something I’ve always been inspired by,” says Tellier-Craig. In explaining Au Contraire’s production, he points across the Channel to early ’90s pioneers My Bloody Valentine, beloved by musicians far and wide. “What I liked about My Bloody Valentine was the big mess of sound, the oceanic density of the arrangements and production. The goal was to play with that, using totally different instruments.”

Lyrically, Gainsbourg was highly influential, though it’s hard to tell as Tellier-Craig’s words are nearly indecipherable (even to francophone ears, he assures me). The title of the album’s lead track, “Haute infidelité,” only hints at the smut that likely lurks within, as no lyric sheet is provided (even to journalists). St. Jacques sings her own verse on roughly a third of the album’s tracks, in a style that’s relatively bright and clear. But Tellier-Craig’s writing is intentionally mysterious, and further submerged by the phrasing, the singing and the mix.

“I don’t want it to be clear,” he says. “I do put a lot of effort into what I write though, because it shouldn’t just be an empty gesture. If people wanna dig, then I want to have some depth there, but initially I’m more interested in the sound and the musicality of the lyrics.”

“For me, it’s the opposite,” says St. Jacques. “I prioritize the meaning first and the sonic aspect afterwards.”

“Contrast,” says Tellier-Craig.

En français

The cultural make-up of Pas Chic Chic’s music is also a matter of contrast. Tellier-Craig calls the band “Québécois by default,” with only St. Jacques drawing direct inspiration from this province (specifically the voice of Louise Forestier). For Tellier-Craig, an early onset of Anglophilia—and later, Francophilia—fed a frustration with all things local.

“Starting this band was a reaction against Québécois culture,” he says. “I wanna do something in French that represents another potential face of Quebec because I find everything that comes out of here sounds like shit. But it’s different for everybody in the band.”

“From my perspective,” adds Fillion, “it’s not so much about doing something that’s un-Québécois or anti-Québécois. I’m not reacting against something, I’m just doing something different, using a really long history of experiences from here and elsewhere. I’m always interested in finding elements within our culture that bridge music and aren’t confined to a Québécois identity. What always speaks to me most in the art that comes out of Quebec is the stuff that’s meant to be universal.”

As with Malajube and We Are Wolves, the absence of provincial roots-music trappings is part of what’s facilitated Pas Chic Chic’s crossover to local anglophone crowds, as is the fact that their handful of gigs to date has included three prominent shows in Mile-End. But while it would be tempting to lump them into a Europhile subset of “the Montreal scene,” their engagement with the scene pre-dates the English-Canadian invasion that brought us Pop Montreal and most of the buzz bands that the international media picked up on. That said, none of Pas Chic Chic were born in this city either, though they’re all pur laine.

And as for Mile-End, they’ve never lived there, but half the band walked its streets and holed up in its studios when it was still a remote neighbourhood, when it was possible to get a coffee at Olimpico without being overcrowded by sunglasses, spandex and cell phones.

“What makes a lot of us gravitate around that area and places like Hotel2Tango is more the process that these people embrace,” says Fillion. “It’s the work ethic, the approach to art, the approach to marketing your art. It’s an alternative way of making music, which Pas Chic Chic embraces. We wrote, recorded and produced our record, we did everything ourselves for three years.”

Though they came up from somewhat disparate musical styles, all five members of Pas Chic Chic found common ground in the challenge to do something they’d never done, to craft what is essentially pop music. For Fillion, what keeps him coming back to music (and putting the brakes on his teaching career) is a personal bond that’s hard to break.

“I never play music with strangers,” he says. “I’ve always collaborated with people I respected and loved and Pas Chic Chic is great because it’s that, but even more so. And as we’re getting older, the circle of people that’s sticking with music is getting smaller and smaller, and so the collaborations are more fulfilling and more exciting.”

CD launch with les Momies
de Palerme at Lion d’Or on
Wednesday, April 2, 8 p.m., $12