As to celebrate their one and only Self/Titled debut album, released on this day seven years ago, only followed in 2016 by an instrumental movie soundtrack, Montreal-based duo Gold Zebra return after a long hiatus, with the new single “La Ville”, part of an upcoming album in the works.
The pair, Julie (Vocals) and JP Richard (Synthesizers, Guitar), affiliated with the ‘maison de disques’ Visage Musique, together with well-known bands/artists from the Quebec capital’s underground scene, such as Police Des Moeurs, Xarah Dion, Brusque Twins, Femminielli, and Tony Cops, had seduced at the time with their emotional and elegant blend of analog synths and fascinating vocalizations in both French and English, inspired by the new wave and synth-pop of the ’80s with an Italo-Disco flair, almost to anticipate its current resurgence, dubbed by some “disco noir”.
“La Ville” leaves aside the disco leanings for a mesmerizing synthetic pop that joins the dots between melody, melancholia, and French appeal laced with cathartic poetry.
Sinuous nostalgia and entrancing melancholy enclosed in an enveloping organic full circle of soothing self solace, unfurl over a warm cinematic emotional flow of painful confessions, lying on relentlessly forlorn, rumbling bass pulsations, punctuated by hypnotic dry beats with a repetitive gait, overlaid by airy forsaken glaring synth adrift and sparse wistful tinkling chimes, when suddenly a baritone guitar vibrates of obsessive plaintive melodies to pierce the dense haze around a pensive, sad female vocals’ powerfully hypnotic and dramatic lament of slow-burning pain.
Superb!
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