In less than six years, Parisian trio JE T'AIME have already made their fourth album. This frenetic pace goes hand in hand with an attitude: headlong rush, never stop, never be caught up by the past (and if possible try along the way to catch the present, that thing we try to live in but which spends its time dying). Between classic cold wave references and contemporary revival, JE T'AIME has imposed a style, a way of doing things that is demonstrative, excessive, danceable, aggressive... but also sincere and touching, finding a form of poetic elegance in its insolence. So let's get the lame questions and lazy formulas out of the way straight away: no, Useless Boy won't be the ‘album of maturity’, far from it, and that's just as well.
In fact, it's quite the opposite: the Peter Pan syndrome we already felt so strongly in the PASSIVE / AGGRESSIVE diptych and this rejection of reality via a dizzying eternal dance are more than ever at the heart of the story. JE T'AIME is aware of its flaws, but rather than learning from its mistakes and seeking to rectify them, chooses to brandish them proudly in a romantic finger given to the etiquette. A theatrical sense of too-much, of the daring gesture of doomed anti-heroes, of tragic glitz: Nightcrawler plucks at us with an openly unabashed electro-pop approach and vocals that are higher than ever and whose liveliness doesn't entirely hide the melancholy of the synths.
What is JE T'AIME's driving force, what pushes them to make record after record? Unbroken Sleep, with its blend of post-punk and synthwave, is a strangely cinematic bridge between eras, a compelling retro-futuristic lament. Are they keen to experiment with new things, to tell us new stories? Like so many authors, JE T'AIME sticks to the same themes, the same obsessions, and their expression sounds like a confession, a cathartic therapy, an exorcism. Regrets, a quest for instant freedom that only builds walls for a new prison, and the dances mutate into an expressionist nightmare carried by the vocals of Daniel Armand, alias dBoy, who is at once performer, actor and grieving soul. The ghosts eventually catch up with us as soon as the pace slows down, on the haunted, funereal title track, the desperate, slightly hallucinatory minimalism of Wrong Fold and its IDM touches contrasting with its acoustic guitar, the crepuscular Letters From Hell and Stories Not Told, a superb cold, melancholy conclusion tormented by the 'Curian' echoes of One Hundred Years. JE T'AIME is familiar with poignant, tortured outbursts and Useless Boy is full of them.
Don't assume we've come just to cry: in the meantime, the guitars will have oozed all their sadness, but we'll have wiggled our bum-bum feverishly with Dead Leaves and its heady nostalgia or Whispers (Lost in the Echoes) and its panicked post-punk. As JE T'AIME continue to spiral downwards, they also continue to deepen their purpose and approach, whose vanity and superficiality ultimately appear as a modest showcase: a superficiality of the surface, in short. In their refusal to grow up, the band continue to delve deeper into their subject and offer their most accomplished album, the culmination of their explorations. After all, yes, they are ‘Useless Boys’: they serve no purpose, but they've understood that if you're born, it's not to ‘serve’, it's to die.
