Niki N. Phaser

French pop-rock legends, Indochine are preparing the official release (November 20) of a new single, Le Lac, taken from their latest album, La République des Meteors, their eleventh. Not the most obvious choice for a single, Le Lac is still a nice song, but not as poignant as Republika, which was overlooked for the third time. Maybe the fourth is a charm. La lettre de métal is also quite a gripping piece of music, displaying once again Indochine’s pop-rock complexity. Nicola Sirkis and co. have been touring the new album, follow-up to 2x masterpiece Alice & June, in all the familiar places, to great success. They’ll keep at it all troughout the next year, when they have scheduled a monster-gig on “Stade de France” on June 26. It’s been sold-out almost a year in advance.

Le Lac VIDEO and also try La Lettre de Metal and maybe also Republika

Las Vegas alternative outfit of ‘electric horsedudes’, The Killers, have added two more singles to their respectable collection: The World We Live In and A Dustland Fairytale, both from their 2008 breakthrough release, Day & Age. The first is for Europe, while the dusty ballad is for their native land and the rest of the non-European world. It’s quite fascinating that the songs have a similar gentle dynamic, so we can’t really blame them for having a double-standard approach with their twin singles. One thing that we might impute is that The World We Live In does not hold the advantage of such a well crafted video, like the American single. Director Anthony Mandler surpassed himself with the ‘rebel without a cause in his seventies’ drama set to The Killers’ track. It has all the chances and surely deserves to become one the classic movie-videos. Of course, the secret lies in Flowers’ lyrics who are supposedly inspired by his folks’ story. The song is not about what happens in the video persay, but it surely creates the image of a romance in a God-forsaken desert place. In a way, it’s something genuine American, that only a non-American would truly grasp.

THE KILLERS A Dustland Fairytale VIDEO

I am sad to say and maybe some of you are sad to admit that The Cure’s previous album, The Cure (2004), should have been their last. It was one of those rare cases when a collection of new material is as good as the band’s best of. It had everything, from catchy poppy singles, like The End of the World and Taking Off to pain-filled poems like Lost and The Promise. The agent of their ever present dark side is a track called Anniversary and it could be described as One Hundred Years in slow-motion. It’s filled with the Cure-like phaser effects and delayed piano keys and echoes in some apocaliptic distance. It grows and grows and you just get tangled in all the sounds as if in a spider web (you get the reference, right?). We could almost call it music as a fit of some disease that causes amnesia. The lyrics are as ambiguous as ever when Robert Smith is in his dark moods. You never really know if the woman he’s talking to is alive or dead. The beginning of each verse with the line “A year ago today/tonight” doesn’t offer to much hope for the first option. The end, “I never let you go”, suggests a feeling of not moving on… Anyway, it’s not really about words with this one, it’s about the atmosphere. The music is uplifting, yes, but more in the “my spirit is going to Heaven because I’m dead” sense of the word.

LISTEN TO LIVE VERSION HERE