THE TRUFFAUTS – Refrain
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When I first reviewed an album from The Truffauts back in 2010, the first thing I pointed out was how long they had been around. Cue forward another fourteen years, and this band from around Nuremberg is still around, with their fourteenth album Refrain, coming three years after its predecessor. Most bands are at their best early on in their careers, when they are still young and unspent. The Truffauts are the exception to that rule, rather aging like a good wine. It’s not as if they change what they are doing. Stylistically they are somewhere between power pop and indie rock, starting with their carefree kind of music in the late eighties, and taking a longer break in the mid-nineties after five albums. Since the new millennium, they have reincarnated as a matured band that usually brings out new records every three years. On Refrain, most songs come with English lyrics, but like in the past, there are also a couple of French tracks, as band founders Jean-Jacques Boucher (bass and vocals) and Ronald Chateauroux (guitar and vocals) are two lifelong Francophiles. The line-up is completed with drummer Monsieur Accèle, a later addition to the band. What is most striking this time how many upbeat songs are on the album, starting with the opener and first single Condundrum, showing how this band can still come up with ultra-catchy choruses after nearly four decades of existence. The following Time is a mellower and more introspective piece, before Tim B., a tribute to film director Tim Burton, is another showcase in power pop perfection. À mon inconnue is a punchy French guitar driven pop song that reminds me of eighties artists like Indochine and Téléphone. How Close is with its nearly six minutes an atypically long track, and its nice instrumental parts remind me of Television. Another band that comes to mind are Big Star who also knew how to combine great power pop with a certain lack of success. 33 tours is a self-referential song about not finding a chorus, followed by the short and fast Drowning, a nice exercise in sixties pop music à la Kinks. Take To The Mountains is a cover version of a minor hit from 1970 by the rather unknown pop singer Richard Barnes. While cover versions can be tricky to handle, this is a vast improvement on the rather kitsch original. Ambrosia is a ballad with strange rhymes, and it’s this weirdness that makes this track work. Daylight takes us back to jangly power pop, before the album ends with Un rêve bourgeois after a compact forty minutes. It may be my surprise at how vital The Truffauts still sound after all these many years, and while there might be the one or other album in their discography which might have left more of an impact, Refrain might very well be the best album I have heard from them. It’s this combination of carefree jangly power pop with the guitar driven indie rock antics that make sure that their songs still feel alive and full of meaning. Great stuff indeed! |
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11 songs |
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38:44 minutes |
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***** **** |
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Genre: indie rock / power pop |
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