Jaws The Shark – Still Young
Some form of intimidation is to be embraced if you’re going to be successful at doing anything. Businessmen wear their fanciest suits, not their torn down pyjamas. Teachers use fancy lingo, not street talk. And, charlatans promise success, not warn against failure.
Rock musicians take a queue from the ol’ Blues Brothers. Intimidation might be all that most would-be audiences will understand. It’s not a matter of faking it until you make it. It’s a matter of twisting their arm until they yell “Uncle!”.
This is what Jaws The Shark does on Still Young. This is a loud garage-rock number that dares listeners to sneak behind the singer and turn off his mic and amp. Would this dissuade him? It hardly looks like it. Jaws The Shark is willing to scream for his supper. You can’t go arguing with that.
Thibaud de Corta – Comme un chien
Genre: pop-rock, indie-rock
We don’t like stereotyping. It gets us nowhere. It’s reductive. Worst of all, it makes us only see what are eyes are allowed to see.
Still, just like choosing a music genre may determine some of a musician’s choices, so does singing in a particular language may play open the ideas that they want to convey.
It’s hard to sing in German and not embrace the language’s powerful, obtuse nature. It’s hard not to sing with an Irish accent and not embrace poetry and a promise of freedom. One might assume that it is difficult to utilize the French language and not adhere to a sophisticated, in-the-know approach.
Thibaud de Cortas’s Comme un chien might have been a light indie-pop tune if sung in any other language. Here, however, it is presented like a late-night pub crawl through rooms where cigarette smoke is two-inch thick and where sexual politics and existential philosophy are discussed loudly. There’s something rather capricious about Thibaud de Cortas’ baritone-lead storytelling. But, just put your confidence in it and, boy, will it tell you some stories.
