/A\

Thrown by this one.
I had loved so much Emilie Zoé’s 2nd album, so it’s an understatement that I was eagerly awaiting the following.
Which came fast, in the form of a semi OST concept-album, and duo of Emilie and her producer. Unfortunately the clay-Pigeons shooting missed the target, except for the well-done "The Painter".
Quite a year after, she enters not only the return of her genius drummer Nicolas Pittet, but also the arrival of Franz Treichler, the founder of the Young Gods, flagship band of Helvetian underground rock. The trio built this way, on the initiative of a (canceled) festival, is named /A\ and it’s enough to make your mouth water!

However, it’s difficult to get into this album, which experimental style is on the whole rather far from what Emilie did under her own name. To achieve this, you just have one imperative: free yourself from what you could expect, go there with a new ear.

The tone is set from the 1st piece, "Hotel Stellar": deadly floydish – and in particular when Franz’s voice, tampered, comes in (4:18). And it’ll remain this way until the last piece, superb "Our Love is Growing", almost instrumental (the 4 emblematic words of the title are the only lyrics).
So electric guitars with pedals, often spacey, are in. But roughness too, with a martial side à la The Wall ("Fire in my Fingers"), enhanced by a flock of samples and electronic percussion sounds, or trip-hop in the manner of Portishead or Archive when the 2 voices are mixed up ("We Travel the Light").
Chosen as a single and released as a scout, "Grain Sand and Mud" looks like affordable pop music... compared to the rest of the album (although that’s not the case of course).
One song only could almost be coming from folk songwriting: "Count to Ten" is the only arpeggio track that make us out of the stifling atmosphere. You can find Emilie’s sensibility, and it could appear in an album of hers, if it weren’t these effects that come fleshing it out, without flushing it out.
As for the lyrics, between automatic writing and war poetry, "The Leaves" fall; autumn is naturally the season which befits this record thrown out of nowhere, out of nowember. And I’m thrown by it myself.