GLAUQUE + BRUANT + RARI

GLAUQUE

What is Glauque? A color? A mood? An era? Or all summed up in the exploits of a band whose genesis dates back to 2017, when Louis Lemage, a student on a break from his studies who wanted to transpose his flayed lyrics into song, produced a few demos with Aadriejan Montens, a student at the Conservatoire de Namur in Belgium. A few months later, they were joined by Baptiste and Lucas, themselves students at the Conservatoire, and it wasn’t long before the four of them were giving their first concerts, making it necessary to adopt a name. Glauque.
Following on from the Glauque EP, a 6-track EP featuring their first singles, Les gens passent, le temps reste is their debut album. Like the band’s polysemous name, Glauque’s music is distinguished by its ambivalence in expressing evil and the rage to live. “Facing up to loss with all the good and not-so-good it leaves in us”: that’s the spirit that runs through the 12 tracks on Les gens passent, le temps reste. A loss that is not limited to the sense of impermanence betrayed by the album title, nor to the 10-minute mourning of the final track. It only partly coincides with the break-up of Bleu.e, the disenchantment of Plan Large, the fatalism of Pas le Choix.

No, what seems to have been lost along the way is the very feeling of existing. Or of existing badly, incompletely. Hence the refounding burst of lucidity expressed in Plusieurs Moi, in which Louis is thrown back on himself, his doubts leading him to declare “I’m not an artist”. Hence the uncompromising self-portraits of Friable et Noir, in which words denounce impostures, both the author’s and everyone’s, even if it means emerging with the bruised face of a boxer after the gong. If Brel’s art of self-flagellation comes to mind, the industrial beats, as if produced by the valves in the engine room of an ice-breaker, take us back to an implacable modernity from which we can only escape through intoxication, notably dance. Each text is like a leap into the abyss of an age devoid of horizons. Starting a family? Rance definitively renounces it. A nihilistic approach? More a quest for truth. To lie neither to oneself nor to others. To admit that we can be multiple in a world that is reluctant to acknowledge any complexity. To endure mortality without seeking the slightest consolation in a mythologized past, without seeking refuge in a Saturnian melancholy, without believing in love while searching for it. And turning despair into a fighting bond.