Alix Fernz aka Alexandre Fournier has been the talk of the town ever since the Mothland label put him on the map. And that’s only the beginning, as the Montreal artist travels the indie festival circuit, feeding a burgeoning myth. We could testify to this on Saturday at the Sala Rossa.
Alix Fernz and his band defended a small part of Bizou, an album released in April that certainly didn’t go unnoticed. Not very tall, not very well built, but nevertheless athletic, tattooed all over, hair peroxide. Clearly, the underwritten frontman is banking on a familiar rock star profile.
As he himself states when asked, Alix Fernz is in no way a fan of psychedelia, ambient or other placid frequencies he considers bland or downright brown. He clearly prefers more muscular, more square, more rock, more punk, more post-punk, more glam, more hardcore, more synthwave, more noise. He prefers to smell the polyethylene flowers, to borrow the title of a recent song of his. He’s prone to evocative tales of song, which he calls Muselière, Crack de dent, Cage en verre, L’étranglé, Défigurée and more.
The intense attitude and look of Fernz and his fearsome creatures draw on punk imagery, but the apparent roughness of the craftsmanship doesn’t exclude more complex rhythmic and harmonic structures.
There’s the rigor of prog and metal when these styles are well executed, but the shagginess of the interpretation camouflages the rigor, fortunately.
