C2C is a band to which I was introduced by guesting on one of the many brilliant shows on RaW1251AM. The DJ quartet from Nantes released their début album Tetra in France last summer and our Unsigned and Upcoming show featured the first of the single releases in the UK from that album, Down The Road, late last year. The UK release of Tetra was back in March, making this post heinously anachronistic, but if the maxim of "better late than never" applies, then here I satisfy the lesser of two evils.
Tetra‘s cheeky artwork. I should point out that C2C are not depicted.
The album itself took two years to complete and kicks off with The Cell. That opening track begins as something of a lullaby, which soon subsides for the electronic and scratch sounds that define this album. From both this pleasant opener and later party pieces Down The Road and Arcades, we enjoy some licks from misusing turntables that, despite conjuring up images of disintegrating plastic, sound incredible. On Down The Road, it is utterly exquisite. Why the song isn’t everyone’s favourite single release of 2012 is beyond me.
The quartet avoid the trap of creating an album that sounds generic in itself by varying the tones, motifs and styles between songs so as to create a kind of White Album eclecticism. Happy is a gospel song performed over an electronic underlay and Give Up The Ghost juxtaposes it with an ethereal venture into psychedelic rock, again colliding it with the "scratch" sounds that C2C so perfectly executes.
Lyrically, there’s nothing to get excited about, but everything is as catchy as hell anyway, if Dante did in fact describe hell as catchy. Because Of You and Who Are You probably best showcase a talent to put together simplistic verses that are easily enjoyable and pair against several layers electronics and backing singers with many an "ooh" and a "la".
As we get to the business end of the album, Arcades, Le Banquet and F.U.Y.A. arrive as a trinity determined to end the playful nature of Tetra and close with some serious, hardhitting stuff. One could be forgiven for thinking we’re being told directly that experimentation is all over and now we’re into masterpiece territory. Each piece works incredibly well. Arcades is nigh perfect, worthy even of Daft Punk’s Homework in its quality. If ever there was a song that needed a decent soundsystem to fully appreciate, Arcades is that song. Then Le Banquet does something differently entirely: instead of simply epitomising C2C’s skill with synthesisers, it further introduces a plethora of guest speakers, albeit only through soundbites of speeches by Presidents and other notable orators of the twentieth century.
F.U.Y.A. has vexed me since first listening. I’m yet to ask a French person if the phrase means anything to them, but on several attempts to discover any reasoning behind it, Google has thus far failed me. The piece itself is solemn, melancholy where Give Up The Ghost was woeful, but all the while driven and determined. I call it a “piece” in fact, because it is more like a movement from a classical suite than a closer to an album of electronic music. I would seriously love to see an symphony orchestral arrangement of F.U.Y.A.. At 3:45 – or 1:03 in the radio edit below – it shifts into something like a super-scratch mode for thirty seconds of blissful music. Like I said, the trinity of closers work incredibly well together and sell the album as a whole beautifully.
It took two years to make Tetra; I’m waiting with bated breath to see what C2C give us in 2015.
Fire Or Freshness 