Staël – Quand – Silence on Tourne – La Rage au Dents – circa 2010 – MySpace Band Page –
You wonder sometimes – I was going through a hard drive full of songs I had downloaded from MySpace between 2006 and 2010 earlier today. Myspace, for those of you who don’t remember, was a very good idea – a brilliant idea, a site which created a forum for bands, photographer, writers, artists and just interesting people from all over the world to hang out and see what each other was up to. It had a wonderful search engine – one which has never been duplicated. It offered you the opportunity to search on a whim – pick a country, a style of music – or pick a band and go to their page and see who they were following – chance were, they were all on the same page – and then the wandering would begin – sometimes for hours and sometimes for days. And many of those bands had been signed to labels, and a lot weren’t – and there were embed players that had as few as three and as many as 12 songs to dig through and download. It was musicians exchanging ideas and showing their stuff. A lot of those bands went on to other and bigger things. Mumford and Sons offered up demos and a day-by-day rundown of what pubs they were booked to play at and what bands they were seeing. But a lot of bands had the best of intentions, the most compelling of songs, the most excellent production – yet, for whatever reason; whether it was financial pressure, disappointment, impatience or a passing fancy, didn’t go beyond the Myspace page and ultimately disappeared.
That’s pretty much the case in point tonight – the French band Staël were around from roughly 2007 to 2010. Put together one album. Worked on a film and then vanished. I don’t know what happened to them or if they morphed into something else, changed genres, or gave it all up – I don’t know.
But there was something about this band I liked and after not hearing them for 8 years, giving these old downloads a listen and realizing my first hunches were right – it’s just the outcome was wrong.
So tonight it’s three songs off their first (and presumably only) album, La Metamorphose – a 6 track mini-album that has some interesting material going for it.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I thought I would share this with you to see what you thought of it.
Crank it up and sit with it for a few minutes. You might be surprised.
