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Les Pommes de Lune
Une fleur / Les chimeres - 7"
Hypnotic Bridge - 2022
Michael Panontin
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Of all the cool things the nineties introduced us to, from lime green and tropical orange t-shirts and brown leather jackets to bands like Pram, Broadcast and Stereolab, none is perhaps as satisfying as ye-ye music.
That sixties Gallic phenomenon first started showing up in the CD racks as mid-priced France Gall, Brigitte Bardot and Francoise Hardy comps. By mid-decade, April March was covering Gall's 1964 single, 'Laisse tomber les filles'. Then the excellent Pop a Paris series arrived and suddenly urban bars and cafes were spinning obscure tracks like Jacqueline Taieb's '7 heures du matin', Delphine's 'La fermeture eclaire' and Gillian Hills' 'Zou bisou bisou' (the latter of course made famous in an episode of Mad Men).
Quebec was in on the secret almost from the start. Not only did the popular ye-ye hits of the day filter across the Atlantic to the province's palmares, they also helped launch a local scene that bequeathed plenty of interesting singles. (For a taste, check out Les Intrigantes' perky 'Mets chinois', 'Mon mini-croulant' by the very young Christine Martin and her group Christine et Ses Copains or Marie Claude's 'Un peu beaucoup', produced by Jean-Pierre Massiera during his brief stay in Quebec.) Unfortunately, those records remain pretty well unknown outside of a handful of cratediggers in the Montreal area.
Which brings us to Les Pommes de Lune, a new group that includes a couple of those aforementioned Montrealers, Daniel Fiocco and Gaven Dianda. The five-piece - guitarist Fiocco and bassist/singer Dianda, along with Charlie Houle-Belanger on vocals, Sylvain Arsenault on the keys and Antoine Binette Mercier on the drum kit - have dug deep, unearthing Christine Delaroche's forgotten 1967 b-side 'Une fleur' and pairing it with it with a groovy version of Status Quo's 'Pictures of Matchstick Men', en francais no less.
Those who have spotted the modly dressed Fiocco zipping around town on his vintage Vespa or listened to Dianda's former band the Saffron Sect will hardly be surprised when they drop the needle here. Save for some of France Gall's best tunes, it's hard to find another record that so deftly captures the sheer ebullience of ye-ye as 'Une fleur'. And Les Pommes' version doesn't disappoint. The jubilant horns may have been toned down a bit and the mix updated with a more overtly electric guitar, but otherwise the rhapsodic feel of the original is all there. Ditto for the backside. 'Les chimeres' stays pretty faithful to the Quo's version, but with the song's familiar flanging effect cranked up to eleven and of course Houle-Belanger's excellent singing, it makes for a pretty nifty addition to the psych canon.
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