A dizzying anachronistic art-pop record for the ages. Lounge jazz on crack.

US-Belgian art-jazz-pop duo Zach Phillips and Ma Clément strike hard and fast on their debut album on Fat Possum records. Back in 2021, the duo released a 20-song compilation that dabbled in the lo-fi realm, short sweet tracks that opened and closed in scintillating fashion. An impressive feat, given multi-instrumentalist and producer Zach Phillips is known for a whole host of other projects such as Blanche Blanche Blanche, Perfect Angels, Martyr Group and OSR Tapes. With this album, his real skill triumphs. In Rong Weicknes, Zach and Ma don’t just cross the globe to create together… they’re swimming in an entirely different ocean.

The opening half of the album is raucous, restlessly racing into one early single, “As Above So Below” before pausing, a heavily automated voice asking the listener this: “In this record there are gaps but they are filled with images. Would you rather have an explanation or an image?” Ironic, given the music seems suffused with sound bouncing on all corners of its form, ‘gap’less, if anything.

So what, then? It seems the album is so purposefully laced together, brimming with such content that it evades predictive direction. The duo seem to make music to enable, encourage, no, necessitate a hermeutics of suspicion - an intepretative skepticism to art that works to expose repressed or hidden meaning. What’s in a name?, asks Shakespeare’s Juliet. What’s in a sound?, ask Fievel is Glauque. The answer is images, different dependent on what you hear, who you are. Following this predicament, the album’s early hit Love Weapon builds from sprightly chords into a fearless wall of sound, with an instrumental kleptomania in the repetition of earlier melodic lines. The art revels in itself, sound within sound. It’s a triumphant track and surely one of the best of the year.

In this melting pot of sound their influence is varied and puzzling, though always seems to work in quiet confidence; we might go from a song in Mario Kart to the old-school Barbie movies, to tavern music in the Renaissance era. As Andy Cowan at Mojo Magazine put it, “Zach Phillips and Ma Clément condense more ideas into one song than some bands ever manage”. Almost inevitably, many a reviewer have likened this to Black Country, New Road. On the contrary - here the time signatures boomerang back and forth, there is a frenzied pace evocative of some medieval dance, André Sacalxot’s flute and sax are always bemoaning the stasis of any unchanged sound, listening intensifies and suddenly sentences feel that they should never end.

“You remember dark dancing?” Ma opens on one middling track. The poetic lyrics sprawl through stream-of-consciousness, sometimes inaudible or mumbled, of a rhythmic and planetary mind, fit for the maximalist genre. On track ‘Haut Contre Bas’, the duo finish with a great swelling, grandiose piano thrushes blooming and cartwheeling throughout space and an unfinished, off-key upwards scale indicative of the left foot the album dances gratuitously with.

The LP is impressive as a stand-alone. But the duo worked hard to get to such seemingly carefree, titillating lightness. Zach and Ma, joined by six other musicians, recorded three live takes for each song, from which they created almost one-hundred musical titbits to edit into a final version. Fievel is Glauque have opened for Stereolab, whose retro-futurist themes and hybrid genres marry well with this offering. And yet, this corner of pop is less dream-like and sleepy, more crazed and transcendent, perhaps a little like sleep paralysis.