In self-imposed exile from the international club scene, Marie Davidson teams with two close collaborators for a self-consciously odd collection of Lynchian lounge music and digitized funk.
Always ahead of a trend, Montreal musician and producer Marie Davidson quit touring in September 2019, six months before everyone else did. Years of vigorous, largely solo travel behind 2016’s Adieux au Dancefloor and 2018’s Working Class Woman left her depleted and addicted to the sleeping pills she used to cope with insomnia, she told the CBC. Plus, she was tired of club music. “I want to make chansons, you know?” she said. “I want to tell stories and sing.”
Marie Davidson & L’Œil Nu, Davidson’s first project since stepping back, features her vocals and synth against backdrops she constructed with two close collaborators: Pierre Guerineau, her husband and partner in the synth-pop duo Essaie Pas, and Asaël Robitaille, who helped to produce songs on Working Class Woman and Essaie Pas’s 2018 album New Path. Renegade Breakdown, their debut release, is a self-consciously odd and varied collection of classical pop songwriting, lounge music, ’80s-inspired synth-funk, and moody chanson.
Not that you’d know it from the opener, where a heavy four-on-the-floor beat animates one of Davidson’s signature, biting, voiceover-like spoken performances. “By the way, there are no money makers on this record/This time I’m exploring the loser’s point of view,” she quips. “The uglier I feel, the better my lyrics get.” Think of this as the “old” Marie Davidson—the one we’re used to—introducing a new version, who rejects aesthetic posturing and thinks the dance music industry can keep it, all of it: “Your science is a poison I can no longer ingest/Take your prescription and shove it up your ass…Your party sucks anyway.”
Guerineau and Robitaille match her commitment to being unfashionable. They fill the album with rhythms and textures that feel dated and chintzy to contemporary ears, like the digital MIDI-funk and cheaply gated drums of “C’est parce que j’m’en fous,” or else dated and spooky, as on “La Ronde,” where a tuneful, saccharine chanson is overtaken by screeches and tolling bells. As Renegade Breakdown cycles through styles, the only constant lies in lyrical nods to the anxiety and dislocation of solo travel and the effort required to steady oneself. “I keep my fingers crossed as the plane is taking off/I’m feeling kind of lost/Today I’m back to rock,” Davidson intones on “Back to Rock,” the album’s second track: seven and a half dirge-like minutes of AC/DC guitars and “Mad World” interpolation beneath thick synthetic smog. While the title and placement imply a formal disavowal of electronic music, the sheer unearned indulgence presents its own critique. “Drive me somewhere nice/Give me loads of ice/I love my drink real cool,” Davidson demands in the intro, as if riffing on a tour rider. In classic Marie Davidson style, the outright criticism of one thing is also a silent, tacit criticism of everything not mentioned.
Renegade Breakdown isn’t the sound of solitary days and nights on the road; it’s the noises and voices filling the empty space, a reckoning with the ironies and tragedies of life as a musician. “Just in My Head” confronts the dissociative feeling of showing up to the club and hating every minute: “Sitting in a corner waiting for the show to be over … Is it that something is changed? Why the music feels lame? Why do I feel so blue?/Or am I going strange?” The song itself sounds more like the forlorn jazz of a vacant hotel lounge, or Angelo Baldamenti’s skulking “Audrey’s Dance” from the Twin Peaks score. On “Lead Sister,” Davidson laments Karen Carpenter’s fatal struggle with anorexia, singing ominously in French about an “angel voice” who becomes “overexposed” and then consumed by the “somber idea of perfection.”
As a downcast lounge performer with an edge of sing-talk in her voice, Davidson is remarkably convincing, and as a series of experiments, Renegade Breakdown never fails to be interesting. What it lacks is the urgency and stylishness of Davidson’s past albums, which is almost certainly the point. Not every fan of her dedicated club output will appreciate a song like “Sentiment,” the twinkling French-language closer that evokes the overture to a ’60s art film, complete with the gentle whirr of a projector. Nor, I suspect, does she want them to. Even as its musical forms and source material remain familiar, Renegade Breakdown is a work of knowing misdirection, a way of staking out new creative territory that’s challenging, idiosyncratic, and proudly uncool.
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