Francos | Fred Fortin Sets The Stage

Released in 2004, Planter le décor is one of Fred Fortin’s key albums. On Friday night at Club Soda, its creator confided to his fans that he had resisted pressure to perform the material on stage. He finally agreed when his better half said, “You do it. What woman wants, Fred wants, and here we are, a room filled to the brim two nights in a row at the Francos de MTL, before a crowd essentially in their thirties and forties, who came to relive their youth for a couple of hours.

When nostalgia calls? Very rarely as far as I’m concerned, but it seemed justified this time. Justified because Fred had brought together the original line-up for the album: Jocelyn Tellier and Olivier Langevin on guitars, Dan Thouin on keyboards, Alain Bergé on drums, the singer on bass and guitars, certainly a top-notch crew in the French-speaking keb landscape.

It was a show worthy of these musicians and their Saint-Prime employer, a highly sophisticated blend of popular culture and stylistic research, a successful marriage between virtuosity, weight and well-placed roughness, between colloquial and finer language.

Two decades of maturity have done the trick: the saturation of low and mid-range frequencies, the harmonic and rhythmic subtleties complementing rock, country and blues chords, the high virtuosity of these performers, all these elements bring us back to the setting set two decades earlier.

As in the album, he began with Mélane, the tale of a man adrift under a sky of vultures, addressing his companion whom he imagines as a lifeline for his troubled existence.

He followed this up with Conconne, the rocky murder of a silly singer, tossed into the bottom of a canyon by an enraged male. The tempo picks up with Lucia, a heavy stoner rock mixed with prog and country, served up with three guits in your face, followed by Pop Citron, pure clopin-clopin’ country, describing a not exactly beautiful loser, a soap novel show-off whose face sells like pudding.

Then it’s time to please our colleagues with Ti-chien, a polyrhythmic instrumental with jazz and prog overtones, featuring the quintet’s jazzmen – Tellier, Thouin and Bergé.

As long as we’re being canine, here’s the story of the bored dog Robeur, who scurries off to row 6 before being spotted by his master, another slow-tempo stoner rock with wonderful bridges.

Here we are in Chateaubriand, the filet mignon fantasized by the desert crossing against a backdrop of Americana folk chopped tartar by increasingly beefy beats of which Alain Bergé has the secret.

And re-country at a trot, evoking a Dérape ending with a good cup of coffee to ward off evil spirits.

A little later, the story of another slip turns out to be less hop-la-vie, immersing the narrator’s face in a pool of Scotch, the sad brush of a guy without a companion. The narrator has to take a cab home, the plaintive harmonica melts into the arch-saturated prog-rock, and we’re moved by the dialogue between guitars and bass, supported by impressionistic keyboards and a beat that couldn’t be more virile.

Once the entire album had been played, Fred Fortin’s quintet went on to play another dozen of their classics, much to the delight of their front-line fans, rounding things off with three encores, two acoustic ones and a final one for the road with a full band, La Loi du chocolat.