Bryan’s Magic Tears (FR)

For five months, it was night. When Benjamin Dupont woke up, the sun had already been below the horizon for hours. Between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., secretly locked inside Studio S**** with Marc Portheau, they stacked guitars, flipped amps, stripped riffs down, simplified arrangements, and made decisions. At dawn, Lauriane Petit would see Benjamin coming home just as she was leaving for work. Without a word, he’d lie down. The sunlight pulled at his eyelids while, in his mind, the journey continued: fragments of music recorded throughout the night slipping into his dreams.

No drugs were needed to record Vacuum Sealed. The intensity of the ten songs that make up the album was enough to make the rest of the world disappear. The music is so massive, its presence so dense, that after a month of work Benjamin and Marc could no longer even speak to each other. Everything was already there, right in front of them. Vacuum Sealed was going to become an absolute classic. One of the cornerstones of their generation-these musicians who also have (or have had) a foot in Villejuif Underground, Pleasure Principle, Bisous de Saddam, Dame Blanche…

Like all great albums, it opens with a howling introduction (“Greeting From The Space Boys,” a giant middle finger raised by the whole band from the stratosphere – that is, Lauriane Petit on bass and vocals, Raphaël Berrichon and Medhi Briand on guitars, Paul Ramon on drums), and then flows into a series of hallucinatory songs (“Excuses,” sung by Lauriane like a Kim Deal composition; “Sad Toys,” the apex of dancing melancholy; “Pictures Of You,” the best guitar riff ever played with a vibrato), before suspending you by a thread. At this point in the record, you start to think Bryan’s Magic Tears might be the prodigy child of The Jesus & Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, and Primal Scream. In 1991, this side of the album would have been recorded by a British band and released on Creation. Except it’s thirty years later, made by a band with a Norman soul, and released on Born Bad Records.

So you have to flip the record.

“I don’t want to be 33 years old making Teenage Rock with a backwards cap and jean shorts.” After flexing muscles on the first side, Benjamin Dupont digs deeper into his own veins and transforms his band. People mistook them for stoned slackers, a band making noise because they have three guitars on stage, slackers singing nonsense in fake English. The B-side of Vacuum Sealed contains three autobiographical pop songs with impeccable lyrics and melodies. In “Tuesday” – “a song about when it’s Tuesday and you’ve got zero serotonin left because you took pills all weekend” – as well as “Isolation” and “Always,” despite the drum machines and deceptive lightness, it’s the Smiths fan who speaks. The grand tamer of melodies. “I think the biggest difference between Bryan’s Magic Tears and other bands in our genre is that a lot of bands forget they’re going to sing over their music.”

One last demonstration of overwhelming production power – “Superlava” – and that’s it: you thought Bryan’s Magic Tears were taking drugs to make music for taking drugs. In truth, it’s the opposite. They compose a body of work that will outlive them, surpass them, that you can already imagine future generations rediscovering with wonder. Because Vacuum Sealed will be exactly that. One of the great guitar records of the early 2020s. And there’s nothing we can do about it. Their talent is simply too great.