ViVa foreVer
By turns harrowing and haunting, Monarch’s 15-year journey to the outskirts of the human psyche has made them one of the most revered bands in the doom underground
“W e have a strange bond that unites us; a very, very strong bond that I think is indestructible,” muses Monarch vocalist
Emilie Bresson, explaining the extra levels of discipline and chemistry that have made this enigmatic French quintet a prolific and distinctive rising force in the extreme doom underground for 15 years. But Monarch’s singular dynamic goes beyond the sort of near-psychic interplay that a band needs to navigate eight albums and multiple splits and EPs of ultra-long sludge-drone dirges.
“I dated Shiran [Kaïdine], our guitar player, for two years, and I dated Michell [Bidegain], our bass player, for 10 years, and now we’re all best friends – more than friends, we’re like brothers and sisters. I couldn’t live without them. I can always rely on them, and that will be the case forever. We know how each other thinks, we can finish each other’s sentences. It’s a weird relationship; when new people come in it takes them time to get used to how we are together, and to find their own place in the band. But in the end we’re all like a bunch of kids hanging out together, making jokes. The way we are together has nothing to do with the kind of music that we play; we laugh a lot, we’re happy together, but we all know that everyone has a dark side, and it needs to come out.”
m
any may be bamboozled by this very Gallic intimacy and openness, British minds doubtless boggling at the prospect of regularly spending long hours in rehearsal rooms, studios, dressing rooms, hotel rooms and tour vans with your ex and her ex. However, Emilie owes her entire musical self-realisation to an incident of verbal aggression against her future bandmates, so maybe they got that out of the way early.
“I met the guys in high school when we were 18; they were in a fastcore band called Tetsuo at the time,” she recalls. “One day I was very angry and I screamed at them, and instead of screaming back they said, ‘Do you want to sing in our band?’ That’s what happened! So I went to practice and started screaming. And I loved it!” Emilie emphasises. “It was a catharsis, I could express all the things I felt inside, in a way that worked for me.”
Soon the high school band were introducing sludgier elements into their blasting power violence, influenced by slow’n’low cult trailblazers such as Noothgrush, Corrupted and Thergothon. Eventually these urges took them over, so the three key musicians formed a new devoted doom band, smartly choosing one of those innately great band names, like Emperor or Queen, dripping with regal grandiosity (“It’s a reference to Project Monarch,” explains
Emilie. “Later we thought it would also be nice because of the butterfly, but mainly it was about the secret mind-control project that the CIA did in the 50s and 60s. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it’s scary!” – see sidebar on p.118).
In Monarch’s case, those elitist connotations were largely ironic:
“We were basically punks, we wanted to make music our own way, without paying attention to anything else. And that’s still the case; when we wrote the new album, we were in exactly the same state of mind. We are still punks, and we still don’t care what other people think. It’s good when people like what you do, it means the feeling you’re trying to express has touched somebody. But it’s more important to express ourselves, and that’s still what drives us today; there is something that has to be purged from our inner selves.”
This attitude is something bands often boast of, even if they enjoy universal adulation, but for Monarch that bloody-minded self-assertion underwent years of rigorous stress-testing.
“When we started, people hated us,” Emilie affirms. “There was no audience in France, very few people even knew this kind of music. We often played to two people, and they’d throw cans of beer at us, or they’d come onstage and explain that we sucked. Now it’s very different. It has evolved in a good way, we’ve found an audience and more people are into this kind of music now. I don’t know if doom is fashionable, but we don’t lose so much money anymore! I think we’re on a path that goes somewhere. We don’t know yet where it’s going to take us, but we’re just letting ourselves go.”
e
milie confesses that Monarch don’t practice often (“We’re very disorganised people,” she intones. “We do it when we have to!”), but since their 2004 demo, barely a year has gone by without at least one Monarch release of some sort. “We never want to let too much time pass before we do something,” Emilie explains. “It’s a very, very, very important thing to us, we couldn’t live without it.”
The band have thus evolved a process of
“There’s no poinT doing This sorT of music if you don’T hurT yourself a liTTle biT”
FOR EMILIE, THERE’S NO SATISFACTION WITHOUT SUFFERING
songwriting that enables them to create, learn and record on a regular basis – even during a period when the bandmates were scattered across the globe – with Emilie’s vocals invariably improvised at the recording.
“Usually I have no idea what I’m going to do before I get to the studio,” she reveals, “I never have time to compose my vocals; usually we’re in a rush and it’s a big mess because we didn’t practice soon enough. But it works. It’s like it’s already there, you just have to let go. I listen to the music so I have it in my mind, but I don’t write down anything precise, I just carry it in me. Sometimes it’s horrible, because I cry, I’m like, ‘I suck! I have a bad voice! I’ve no idea what I’m doing…’ I’m basically a nightmare for sound engineers!” she laughs. “I also listen to other music; this time I listened to Swans’ My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky and
The Seer a lot before recording this. Every album has its own influences.”
There seems to be a greater element of raw melancholy explored throughout new album Never Forever, compared with the cryptic, alien monoliths explored on 2014’s Sabbracadaver. Emilie insists that these distinctions weren’t a conscious part of the process, but you can hear her trepidation when she discusses a throat injury that she suffered in 2015: “I was really scared that I would have to stop forever. I knew I needed to take a break, but I didn’t want to. I have no technique at all, I just scream as loud as I can. I never took a singing lesson. I should, because I’m hurting my vocal cords over time, but I feel if I take lessons it will be less sincere. I don’t know, but there’s no point doing this sort of music if you don’t hurt yourself a little bit.”
This self-destructive conviction helps Never Forever capture the transgressive extremity and emotional force that gave this music such a devastating edge in the first place, as does Monarch’s never-stronger dynamic flow. The passages of heartbreaking beauty and tender fragility serve to intensify the bleak and brutal surrounding doom, making for a far more satisfying, rounded experience than the standard one-dimensional sludge trudge.
“In an artistic way, those contrasts make it more interesting and powerful,” agrees Emilie. “It’s always a good idea for there to be a hint of hope, to make you realise how bad the rest of the situation is. You can’t see that you’re in the dark if you have never seen the light.”
NEVER FOREVER IS RELEASED ON SEPTEMBER 22 VIA PROFOUND LORE
“We’re sTill punks, and We sTill don’T care WhaT oTher people Think”
EMILIE ON WHY MONARCH ARE DETERMINED TO FOLLOW THEIR OWN HADEAN PATH