As if the five coolest musicians in town had found a box of unreleased B-52’s demos and re-recorded them in the urgency and intoxication of a summer night.
Post-punk, this vast sub-genre which has complicated and densified the extremely simple initial program of punk, has been experiencing new good times in recent years. Enthusiastic English or Irish groups led by young people who are pathologically insecure (Fontaines D.C.), catatonic (Dry Cleaning) or berserk (Shame) have found in the work of The Fall and Joy Division a sort of bible.
The kind of post-punk that the Montreal band La Securité drink has little in common with this typically English spleen, its mentors seeming rather to emanate from the American counterpart of this aesthetic.
Think sexy robot vocals, feminist cheerleader backing vocals, and intergalactic keyboards of the B-52’s (Suspense). Think of the funk-influenced rhythm section of The Talking Heads. Think of the New York dance-punk of the 1980s, which had retained only its euphoric skeleton (Serpent) from disco. Think of the guitars that the author of these lines must describe using the adjective “angular” if he does not wish to have his right to practice as a rock critic revoked (Dis-moi).
But because post-punk resurfaces at least every 15 or 20 years, Safety would also have belonged in early-millennium New York, that of the Meet Me in the Bathroom book and documentary, as bands like The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem did everything they could to reinfuse a certain coolness into the country’s scenes, weighted down by ten years of grunge self-pity.
Led by Félix Bélisle (bass) of Choses Sauvages and singer Éliane Viens-Synnott (also behind the keyboards), La Sécurité also counts on guitarists Laurence-Anne Charest-Gagné (who has a solo career under her first name) and Melissa Di Menna (Meta Gruau, Jesuslesfilles), as well as drummer Kenny Smith. The amusing portrait that his comrades draw of the dandy in Waiting for Kenny already establishes him as a mythical figure of the Montreal nightlife.
With three songs out of ten interpreted in the language of Malajube, La Securité signs an album combining the irreproachable elegance of their influences with an impetuosity thanks to which these inexhaustible ideas borrowed from the past are redeployed in the eternal present of the dance floor.