We've witnessed over the last few years the birth of a strange monster, at once utterly charming, opaque, amusing and overwhelming. In the early days of Léa Jacta Est, there was just a guitar and a few pedals. It was called ‘obscure folk’, for convenience's sake. But why restrict yourself? Why should we make life easier for the label-makers? From concert to concert, meeting new people (notably Bleu Reine and Triinu, who are involved in this first album), Léa has refined her universe and moved away from the dark folk gimmicks of her first EP. When you're not really from this world and you're all over the place, to really find yourself you have to go in all directions. Horizons du Fantastique is the result of these explorations.
Léa Jacta Est quickly plunges us into a multicoloured, shimmering fog of mystery, melancholy and the absurdities of life. Death is everywhere and lurks in the shadow of trivial things, giving them all their romanticism as the smallest anecdote becomes an adventure. The omnipresent reverb envelops us and, although the title track assures us that ‘this is not a collective hallucination’, we have our legitimate doubts. Less minimalist than in its early days, Léa Jacta Est frequently relies on the wailing of a theremin to complete the abolition of reality: spectres and aliens wander the corridors of an old kitsch cinema, haunting past memories which, with their abundance of detail, place the artist at the exact crossroads between two french icons, a pop version of Honoré de Balzac and Arielle Dombasle gone full goth.
As you lose yourself trying to reach one of these thirteen psychedelic horizons, you're fascinated by the album's diversity. Atmospheric folk, pop, trap, industrial and a few wicked guitar riffs: Léa Jacta Est offers everything she loves, everything she is. There are hits that lodge themselves in your head, like Tyrannosaure Lucifer, whose chorus and rhythm never let go, or this incredible cover of L'Amour à la Plage. The latter is representative Léa Jacta Est's evolution: played live for several years, the song has gain a violin, double bass, heavy riffs and a few cathartic roars that are absolutely delightful. Above all, as the theremin announced, Horizons du Fantastique is full of UFOs, and its abundance of ideas makes your head spin.
As much an actress as a musician, Léa Jacta Est has a flair for theatre. Whether it's accentuating a detail, building real suspense before a never disappointing punchline, or exacerbating the mundane and extracting all the melancholy poetry from what could seem meaningless little things. The sound design is inspired, with some very down-to-earth things contrast with the dreamlike, hallucinatory mood (Le Programme du Louxor and its intense seven minutes of total weightlessness regularly bring us back down to earth with sounds from the metro)... Like so many reminders, perhaps, that death lurks everywhere and hides, ultimately, in this everyday reality as banal and factual as a corpse modestly hidden in a bin bag. The most absolute sadness oozes out and is met with a constant tongue-in-cheek dark humor: is it first degree, second degree? We're opting for all of them, and probably 666 more. The atmosphere is often subdued, but that doesn't prevent the wildest outrageousness, like the flashy autotune on Les Sept Rivières, acrobatic and totally relevant.
A mad album, Horizons du Fantastique probably expresses what an alien in the throes of delirium tremens would feel if he found himself at his own funeral. Ambitious and rich, it leaves us with a bittersweet finale haunted by mourning, first with a funny and touching dialogue-tribute with an hungry cat about death (Miranda, aka Bubu), then with the testamentary ending Crépuscules and its fatalistic choir. There's a lame expression we use out of laziness when we don't know what to say: ‘the album of maturity’. But what if Léa Jacta Est had given us her ‘album of maturity’ on the first try, by pouring her soul into it, fully embracing her most kitsch impulses and concluding her otherworldly elegies with the most gothic of ‘yolos’? In any case, you can feel the hard work, the will to give everything, the sincere viscerality and, above all, the strong personality that allows her to escape any restrictive boxes. There's another lame expression: ‘it doesn't look like anything’. Those desperate to ‘look like’ something use it pejoratively. Léa Jacta Est and Horizons du Fantastique look like nothing at all.
