In our „Band of the Week“-interview last year, Pays P. mentioned that new things were to come – in particular, a first official release was to be recorded in Brooklyn, New York. We’ll come back to it momentarily, but that was not the only thing that was about to happen for the trio from Paris: After sharing the stage with Big Thief’s Buck Meek at one of his solo concerts last summer, Laura Boullic (lyrics), Lucas Valero (guitar) and Pablo Valero (drums) were invited by their New York colleagues to join the mediterranean leg of their European tour as support band earlier this spring. While this tour, like so many others, was eventually brought up short by the corona pandemic, Pays P. were still able to play their part of it as scheduled. Audience and critics alike greeted them with great warmth, according to the reviews, undeterred by the change of pace and genre between the Parisians‘ surging structures of heavy, sometimes slightly sludge-tinted, interwoven sounds and words, and the New Yorkers‘ dark indie-folk-post-everything extraordinaire. Of course, whoever likes one of the two is bound not to care much about genre limits anyway. And the best match in an evening’s bill is maybe not made by genre at all, but by a shared attitude, a radical love for music, and for the world with its beauty and ugliness alike, sounded out by extreme musical measures, with immense skill and determination. (Further proof: For the rest of the tour, Big Thief were supported by British metalcore innovators Ithaca; this, too, and maybe surprisingly, worked perfectly.)
From this tour, a four track recording of Pays P.’s gig at L’Épicerie Moderne, Lyon, is to be found on Soundcloud. It gives a good impression of the band‘s live qualities and, with three new songs, of the direction their debut album might be taking. Weiterlesen
Manchmal sind es die besten Bands, für die man den längsten Anlauf braucht, und ich habe noch selten so lange gebraucht wie für Big Thief. Das Quartett aus Brooklyn, New York, wird oft unter dem Label Indie-Folk gehandelt, aber ihr Stil ist nicht auf diesen oder irgendeinen anderen Begriff zu reduzieren. Dass hier ein paar Leute ihr Leben lang Musik gemacht und auch studiert haben, dass Adrianne Lenkers Kompositionen und ihre charakteristische Spiel- und Gesangstechnik auch Anleihen aus Singer/Songwriter und Rock haben, Gitarrist Buck Meek aus Texas stammt, was von Jazz versteht und sehr gut darin ist, die richtigen Noten wegzulassen, Drummer James Krivchenia auch Soundtechniker ist und nebenher experimentelle elektronische Musik macht, während Bassist Max Oleartchik einfach immer exakt das (und nur das) spielt, was der Song gerade braucht, das kann man ja alles heraushören – aber es erklärt nicht den völlig eigenen Stil oder die außergewöhnliche Intensität und Dunkelheit, die ihre Musik auszeichnen. Die steht für sich, und vielleicht braucht es ja auch einfach mal kein Genre-Label.