Ranting over musical landscape
Idiosyncratic Québécois punk foursome rewards the adventurous listener
What’s the deal? Curse these two perpetual solitudes.
Québécois quartet FET.NAT no doubt would have been our New Favourite Thing when it first started doing its splatter-y “free-punk” thing a l’autre bord de la riviere Outaouais from Ottawa in Hull seven or eight years ago.
But it’s taken recent championing by the likes of sage local promotion team Wavelength and teensy-weensy upstart label Boiled Records — which just released the band’s dizzying Gaoler EP this past May — to properly thrust this defiantly idiosyncratic outfit into our Torontocentric field of vision.
Our country’s stubborn anglophone/francophone “language barrier” wouldn’t really present much of a barrier to broader awareness of FET.NAT’s freaky-deaky wickedness, mind you, were it not for English Canada’s general obliviousness to the cool stuff that’s always bubbling away in Quebec.
FET.NAT is basically constructing its own language.
Vocalist JFno tends to rant and rave in a kind of free-flowing bastard “franglais,” while the band as a whole flails, judders, stutters, stomps and occasionally sprawls according to the rules of an utterly inscrutable internal musical dialect — 2014’s Poule Mange Poule manages to evoke John Zorn, Neu!’s album Neu! 2 and “Bucephalus Bouncing Ball”era Aphex Twin in a whirlwind 22 minutes — that makes both more and less sense as time goes on.
Gaoler is even more concise with its all-over-the-place-ism, taking a wild dive from diced-up jazzbo freneticism into soothing ambience in just two sides and two tracks.
True, FET.NAT will send less adventurous listeners running for the hills within seconds flat, but the brave souls who like it will wind up liking it very much indeed.
Sum up what you do in a few simple sentences. “The music of FET.NAT is influenced directly by the environmental surroundings of our home in Hull, social deficiencies, visual arts and philosophies. It shapes our music more than music itself. These elements allow us to go in unpredictable and sometimes counterintuitive directions.
“Our aim is to construct, deconstruct and then reconstruct musical ideas through the lenses of nihilism, anarchism, coercion, comedy, social engineering and love.”
What’s a song I need to hear right now? “Trust Cops.” To this I cry: “Police brutality!”
Where can I see them play? At Ratio on June 24, as part of the Tone Festival with Arrington De Dionyso and Pierre-Luc Simon and Brian Ruryk.