We told you about their appearance at FIMAV in 2021, because it sounded like something to see; well, the recording of the concert eloquently demonstrates that it was also something to listen ! The initial idea was really risky: you can like the singular voice of the growlers who scream in front of metal bands, but to gather about fifteen of them? Really?
Coming from an electroacoustic background, Pierre-Luc Sénécal, who came up with the idea for the project, saw in these howls of zombified corpses and other songs from beyond the grave a material to be kneaded, objects to be put in relation by superimposing them to obtain rough textures or rich harmonic sonorities. And then these singers have quite solid abilities in the section of mouth noises and bestial grunts. In the three-part piece Hydra, which explores different facets of the voice, it snorts on a middle note! We already knew that the artistic director of the Victoriaville Festival has a soft spot for vocal explorers like Koichi Makigami, Jaap Blonk, Tanya Tagaq and Yamatsuka Eye (who will be at the festival this year); the Growlers’ concert must have satiated him. Obviously, the images that these voluntarily threatening voices inevitably provoke, it still puts a bit of a heavy atmosphere between the two ears, so much so that we even welcome with pleasure, like a light kiss, the very metal musical accompaniment, explosive guitar and double bass drum, which slips behind the choir in Hate Machine. If you don’t listen to it twice in a row, it doesn’t mean that you won’t come back to it.
The result proves that Sénécal was right to go ahead with this original project. So right, in fact, that after this concert at FIMAV in May 2021, the choir found itself competing in the main stream TV show America’s Got Talent in June 2022, before giving a concert at Foufounes Électriques the following month! There is no other artist who could follow such a route, and that, in itself, speaks volumes!
This album cannot be streamed. To convince you to buy it at Disques Victo, let’s suggest you this introduction, the piece “Hate Machine” on Bandcamp.
