Fievel Is Glauque, the New York-Brussels duo of Zach Phillips and Ma Clément, played an hour and a half of bold, raucous bold jazz-pop at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, Thursday, February 6.
The band opened the set with rocky ballad Love Weapon, the opening bars eliciting yelps of genuine abandon from the keyed-up audience. Love Weapon’s stirring, euphoric breakdown was gratifiyingly extended, drawing headbanging of a zeal and duration more than is common – or perhaps safe – at a jazz concert.
Philips (keys) and Clément (vocals) were joined by friends playing guitar, bass, drums and an instrument called a ‘hand sonic’. This unusual bit of kit floats over the top of things in some extra dimension, a space somewhere between rhythm and melody.
The band rarely perform, this being one of just two shows to tour this album (the other one is in LA, February 8th). Some sheen was inevitably missing: count-ins were endearingly botched; bandleader Zach Phillips gave sedate commentary throughout on how well he thought the whole thing was going. The band’s social awkwardness was matched only by crowd’s.
Such trivialities aside, the performance was remarkably tight. The band seemed controlled by some metric hivemind, one that learnt to count perhaps not with five digits on each hand but seven fingers on one and four on the other.
The star of this show is Clément and her Swiss Army Knife voice. Her usual register is an elven lament, a soft drape blowing in the breeze. For music that can be so frivolous, she can sound wonderfully anachronous. But as she reaches the climax of a line, or some particular word, like Kate Bush or Bjork, Clément leaps into a full-throated roar.
The concert wound its way through most of the new album Rong Weickness, a somewhat blissed out follow-up to 2022’s Flaming Swords. Some favorites from the previous record did get a run out to give the Williamsburg crowd some of the hyperactive, twitchy jazz that first brought fans to the band. Most of Fievel’s songs are surprisingly short for the genre, and this could feel unsatisfying live if each wasn’t such a complete, well-crafted package.
Touches of Steely Dan, Stereolab (who the group have toured with), Alan Parson Project, and Edition Speciale are apparent. The material draws on so many styles and influences that this could become the musical equivalent of mixing red and blue and green Crayolas: a slushy, unappetizing brown.
But the magic of Fievel Is Glauque is that they are a prism; they scatter the light into something entirely its own, something wild and fun. Like all good pop fusion music, they can be disarmingly pretty.
The set ended with Toute Suite, an irresistibly sweet melody set to Clément’s bizarre love poem-lament. This was followed by an entertaining coda, Phillips asking the crowd which song they would like to hear replayed (a refreshing antidote to the societal scourge that is the encore).
Amid the ensuing confusion, and taken aback perhaps by the spectrum of crowd sentiment, Philips launched into an improv session. Bandmates manage to hang on impressively for a minute or so while the crowd figures out what’sgoing on. Inevitably, just as we are coming to terms with it all, a crash of keys and drums brings the whole thing back down to earth.
Upsettingly, Fievel chose not to wheel back out Love Weapon, a song that sounds like it was written to close shows like this. The concert finishes perhaps in the most appropriate way then, with a slightly bizarre, short, yet beautiful fusion jumble.
I left with no clearer picture of how to say “Fievel is Glauque”, or even what it means. Fievel can be as glauque as they want, as far as I’m concerned. But I do know that if you can see them in LA February 8th, you should.
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