Fowl language

>>Duchess Says set off a synth-punk explosion on their long-awaited debut LP, Anthologie des 3 Perchoirs, with guidance from their spiritual
leader – a budgie named the Duchess

BIRDS OF A FEATHER: (L to R) Ismaël Tremblay ,
Philippe Clément, Annie-Claude Deschênes, Simon Besre

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

A banshee is a Gaelic goddess of Irish folklore, one who wails outside a house to foretell the death of someone inside. One version of the banshee myth (similar to that of the mermaid) describes their long, fair hair and the silver combs that doubled as bait. Children were warned to leave such combs be, or be spirited away by a woman who would never shut up.

If you believe in banshees, and you’ve heard Duchess Says singer Annie-Claude Deschênes’s fearsome metal wail, best not tell her where you live. And what of the fate of audiences at some of the band’s early shows, where frantic on-stage hairstyling must’ve left a few combs behind for vulnerable souls to snatch as keepsakes?

And that’s only one of Deschênes’s vocal personalities. There’s also the punk siren, a richer, more musical voice, but no less dangerous. A siren is a bird woman, according to the Greeks, who lures mariners to their deaths with a song. British scholar Jane Ellen Harrison wrote, “Their song takes effect at midday, in a windless calm. The end of that song is death.”

As much as Deschênes’s sonic arsenal and wild-eyed stare evoke fairy, fishy creatures of lore, Duchess Says have their own mythology.

By day, Deschênes and her bandmates blend into the crowd, but by night, they’re a quartet possessed, hosts for their spiritual leader, transmitting abstract messages in a sonic tempest.

The religion? The Church of the Budgerigars, in honour of the Duchess, aka “the spiritual budgie.” (Though Duchess Says is the church’s only house band, CPC Gangbang’s Paul Spence is said to have been so moved by some of their performances that he began speaking in tongues.)

The symbol? A T, like a cross with the top bit shaved off, possibly because it allows for easy Photoshop conversion of Christian symbols, possibly because it’s just so much nicer to sit on that way. Three such Ts dominate the crest-like cover art of the quartet’s long awaited debut album, Anthologie des 3 Perchoirs (“Anthology of the Three Perches”), on Alien8 Recordings. Finally, with this new screed and the huge stack of tour dates that come with it, Duchess Says can revisit the European and American audiences they’ve teased with support gigs in the past, and offer salvation on an international scale.

The anarchy

“Someone warned me that Dutch audiences are very quiet,” says Deschênes, describing a 2006 gig in Utrecht that threatened to be tame. “But I could tell that they really wanted to have fun. So I just did my thing, I started to wind them up, and I’ve never seen anything like that before. Within 20 minutes, it was anarchy.”

All decorum was abandoned as the crowd wrought mayhem, invading the stage and pulling TV sets down from the walls. Before the next band played, security had to pen the unruly audience between barriers.

Such is the effect of seeing Montreal’s Duchess Says, a quartet that pummels you with one hand and molests you with the other, then invites you to dance, and for some reason, you accept. Their synth and guitar riffs race through melodies and over rhythms that could fill a dancefloor or spark a circle pit. And just before monotony sets in, they remove the rug and leave everyone stunned and silent on the floor.

In the beginning, there was only Deschênes, singer and rocker of the keytar, and keyboardist/guitarist Ismaël Tremblay. Together, they relocated from Quebec City to Montreal and launched the band in 2003. But they didn’t last long as a duo.

“After two or three shows, we stopped to re-compose everything and review our approach,” says Tremblay. “That’s when [Philippe Clément] came in. He had his own band, so initially he was just a friend helping us with beats and composition. It was only after about a year that he joined as a guitar player. The band became more and more punk rock after that.”

Drummer Simon Besre, meanwhile, had been in an electro noise band called Intercom, but sought something new and exciting. “We were just playing and recording improvised stuff, very krautrock, and I was mostly playing music on my computer alone, so I got lonely,” he says. “I wanted to play gigs.”

Besre saw Duchess Says for the second time at Café Campus in 2005 and approached Clément in the pisser, having heard that they were looking for a drummer. “What’s your favourite band?” Clément asked, to which Besre replied, “Sonic Youth,” and it was as simple as that.

The band quickly cemented their reputation as a wild live act, and wound up touring North America and Europe with les Georges Leningrad, as well as We Are Wolves and Lovely Feathers.

In recent years, the band has continued to play occasional gigs in major cities, but they’ve been absent from local stages since 2006, only emerging briefly this February at the MAC’s Nocturnes 5-à-7 series. That gig brings back painful memories for Deschênes, who got drunk before the set and broke a toe.

When the Mirror met Duchess Says at a St-Laurent café, Deschênes’s bandmates were still smarting from pain of their own, having fumbled drunkenly through an improv set the previous night, when their side project Quatro played Zoobizarre to about a dozen people.

But more painful still, for Duchess Says and their fans, was the wait for their debut album, three years in the making.

The ecstasy

“Frankly, it took a long time to make up our minds about what we wanted it to be,” explains Tremblay. “We had to find the right balance between the energetic live performance and a really good sound.”

And their patience paid off. Few of the songs will be familiar to those who’ve seen Duchess Says live, though luckily their cover of Six Finger Satellite’s “Rabies” made the cut. It’s a volcanic dance track that the band has truly made their own. But many of the other songs were crafted in the studio.

A drum charge opens the album, setting the frenzied pace, while “Ccut Up” introduces listeners to Deschênes’s startling vocal range. Over the course of the album, the band’s evolution from an electro band with a guitar to a rock band with a synth is evident, as is their stylistic versatility: manic punk, icy synth rock, sweet electro, spooky horror-film soundtrack material, a rawk wank-off and, presumably just for yuks, a track dominated by sounds that seem to have emerged from orifices rather than instruments. Yet the record is unified by its rawness, the often orgasmic arc of the songs, and of course the word of the Duchess, as interpreted by Deschênes.

“It’s the images I have in my head,” she says. “At the moment, I can say 10 images inspire me: the budgie, mathematics, Kleenex, my momo (that’s my aunt), the bear in Lac de l’Est, the carpet at my mother’s house, Phil’s father, my grandmother. I try to make sense of my ideas with the lyrics, because my mind is just chaos.”

Deschênes also organized the album’s cover art. It may evoke the holy trinity—the band’s religion also features nuns and saints, but no violence or martyrdom (“The budgie is still flying around somewhere,” says Besre). But the image and title are partly based on the reality of recording in three locations, from home to two studios and back home again.

“In the end, we finally took everything good that came out of each session. That’s where the title comes from—it’s an anthology of our three years of recording,” says Tremblay. But it’s also a union of three views from the perches, according to Deschênes, a place where you can look back, look forward and look up. For Duchess Says, who’ve been toiling at ground level for five years, this has been their destination.

“It’s a place we wanted to get to,” says Deschênes. “We’re very happy that we finally arrived.”

With the Aversions at la Tulipe on
Thursday, April 17, 9 p.m., $15