Choses Sauvages On Their New Album and The Necessity Of A Wild Performance

Charlie Pinhey

Music journalist & online sub-editor for CLUNK Magazine based in Bristol. Fumbling around on social media trying to tell people about my interviews and reviews. Follow me @charvawritesstuff

We chat with Montreal’s Choses Sauvages on their new record, influences and their wild stage presence

Over the last ten years, Choses Sauvages have built a reputation for their incendiary live shows. On their website, they say they ‘make it their duty to set any stage on fire’ and, before sitting down with frontman Félix Bélisle over Zoom, I’d spent the previous few days scrolling through footage of the Montreal-based dance punk outfit and watched them in snippets command crowds, venue security and grapple with stage infrastructure. The band are enigmatic and at the centre of it all stands Félix.

Yet, there is an intriguing duality to Choses Sauvages. Their back catalogue is doused with elegance and a lot of their tracks are contemplative in nature.

Félix and I discussed this duality, as well as the band’s upcoming album, ‘Choses Sauvages III,’ out on 28th March. We also discussed the band’s new single ‘Cours toujours‘ and touring in the summer, where he also teased some upcoming shows in the UK too.

In your own words, who are Choses Sauvages and what is your role in the band?

Choses Sauvages are getting old to be fair! It’s a band that is almost ten-years-old now. It’s a concentration of friendship and trying to remodel the leftfield pop music in Montreal and in Canada. You’ll also have to excuse me because English is not my first language, but this is a rough determination of what the project is.

All in all, it’s really based on some disco-punk aspects and the new record is definitely tainted with punk or post-punk material. We’ve been travelling the world as a band of friends as Jesus would.

I would be the front man slash the lead singer and the most annoying fuck of all the six of us.

There is, at times, a real difference between how the band sound on record compared with how they sound live. I’m interested to understand where that desire to be so high-energy started. How did that all start?

Long story short, I’m still the bassist of the band but I also hire my good friend Charles to play the bass in my stead, so I can do all of the above and just try to give a show. But the fact that it is so energetic is from the idea of “I don’t know what to do with myself” and the proposition of me not playing bass and singing at the same time anymore.

I’m now just trying to get control of whatever the fuck is happening on stage and trying to bond more with the crowd. Because it’s harder when you have an instrument between the crowd and you to break the fourth wall between the audience and yourself, and the band.

I think this energy came out of a necessity of trying to be busy, as much as I was with a bass in my hand playing. And I think it just came out as a really exclusive, nicely violent experience for the crowd and for myself also.

The records are pretty nice to have a dinner around, you know? But the shows are way more punk in the energy I’d say. The next record is trying to bridge that gap between the live show and how the record is sounding. So, this is something we’re really excited to show the world.”

You’ve said previously this new record, ‘Choses Sauvages III‘, will add a new colour to Choses Sauvages. So, will playing the songs on the record live afford you a higher freedom to go up another level? Is that fair to say?

I totally agree. We are just getting into the prediction part of the show and trying to figure it out. It’s always the same fucking thing. You record an album and then you ask yourself, “How the fuck am I going to do that on stage?” And you’re just trying to get everything that’s important on the record in the show and leave an aspect that’s not quite as cool or important.

And you’re getting really romantic about these things and the band will fight to get them still part of the show. But I’m saying too much. Or maybe I’m not. It’s an interview, so maybe this is exactly what I’m supposed to do.

The band have said previously that the singles that are released act like islands between the records. Is that going to be the case for tracks you have released recently, such as ‘En joue‘?

‘En joue‘ is definitely part of the record and it was always talked about like that. It was the first song we recorded outside of the time we allowed ourselves to take the track. It was recorded separately but at the same place. It was kind of a trial to work with the person who we wanted to work with and also to try another studio.

We got our hands dirty, into more of the production of it. So, we were just trying out this song that was going to be part of the record but still going to be a single just to make sure that we’re not making a mistake to work with this lovely, lovely person and a friend of ours. And it worked out good! So, we did the whole disc there.

It’s a studio that just off our jam space that’s owned by a member of Choses Sauvages also, which is pretty useful when it comes to taping a record. It’s cost efficient.”

As for singles being islands, I think it’s always trials of stuff we couldn’t put on the prior record… I guess when you release an album you’re trying to showcase a little bit of every colour on the spectrum of the album. So ‘En joue‘ is a colour in this spectrum.”

‘Cours toujours‘ is another colour on that spectrum. And ‘Fix’ that is going to come out on the same day as the record is releasing. The music video is also going to be a more rock & roll and raw colour on that spectrum.”

How would you say this new album compares to Choses Sauvages I or Choses Sauvages II?

I think it’s the truest form of us sounding on record. We’ve got no producer for the album, so Choses Sauvages produce it, and I co-produced it. So, it sounds as raw as it gets for making an album. We taped live also; all of us playing at the same time and I think you can feel it. Or maybe I’m getting crazy since I worked a lot on it. But it’s a subtlety that you can hear if you are attentive.

There’s a way more of a raw vibe to it throughout the record, no matter what the song is. It comes through in the production, which I’m really happy about because this is something we have been chasing for all of our records and singles. We found our personal identity throughout the production of this record.

Who were you listening to whilst making this record, and who are you listening to at the moment?

I think we always have some references, but we don’t all listen to the same music. And we have a veto in Choses Sauvages where if we come up with something in a jamming session and if someone isn’t happy with that something then we’ve just got to scrap it.

I think there’s always like this New Wave and synth loving bands. You know LCD Soundsystem and DFA records always on in the background. For myself I got way more into post-punk and punk – Talking Heads are still there for sure and Viagra Boys we’ve been listening to.

I think Pom Poko and Being Dead are two bands that are really nice sounding. Composing a record is always like a big fucking blender of ideas!

When does touring start for Choses Sauvages III?

Somewhere around the end of May, beginning of June we’re going to be touring Europe and also maybe the end of August, early September. I don’t know what countries we’ll plan to do first, but there’s definitely plans to go to the UK.

Do you have a pre-show ritual that you do before a show?

There are some venues that are really jungle gym looking and the first thing I think of is, “what can I grip myself to?” But I also don’t want to take away from the musical aspect by being a monkey. But knowing myself, I always try the [stage] gear before and ask around to see if it’s ok. And even if they say no, I still fucking do it!

I like shaking things up. I come from an experience of seeing live shows as [someone with] ADHD. If you give me an hour-long show, it better be fucking worth it!

It’s not a movie but it’s a beautiful, beautiful, thing to be able to do this nowadays and to share, you know? I’m really generous performing-wise and I expect nothing less from the crowd. It’s a relationship. I guess I’m just an extension of people’s energy. I’m a tool. And I love being a tool and the only fucking thing that makes sense for me to do, honestly.

The band are building a strong back catalogue. Are you finding that you are connecting with any of your older tracks, now that they have been out for some years?

I’m tired of listening to some polite new wave disco-y stuff that we did earlier. They’re still relevant, at least while we’re well established in the community. There are some tracks of our that came out in 2016 or 2017 that we’re known for, but it doesn’t sound like you anymore, because you grow and your tastes change.

It’s a normal thing to do as a person and as an artist. You don’t want to be a copy of what you did before. You always what to push the limits and the boundaries, for yourself but also for the music or whatever art you’re making. Reinventing yourself is important in the process.

Obviously, there are some songs that, you know, don’t tick the boxes that would be ticked. So, I guess the disco sounding stuff, we’re trying to propose it to the crowd live a bit rawer

For a moment, Félix briefly lost his train of thought then quickly composed himself in a way that only a skilled frontman can. He smiled. “Fucking words, they’re just made-up sounds,” which set us both off laughing.

Listen to ‘Choses Sauvages III’ here: