Grand Duchy – Petit Fours
Not a lot of married couples would want to spend their free time cooped up in a studio, bickering over which bass-line complements which synth progression, or which drum loop best emphasises a song’s melody, but then again Black Francis and Violet Clark are not your average married couple. After a leaked studio ‘experiment’ that the pair had produced garnered critical acclaim, Francis and Clark, known collectively as Grand Duchy, decided to break the unwritten law that states that couples should never under any circumstances work together; Petit Fours was subsequently born and rock fans the world over owe a debt to such flagrant rule-breaking.
Come On Over To My House finds Francis inviting anyone and everyone to the kind of party that mothers warn about. His sleazy baritone is not dissimilar to Lou Reed’s vocal stylings, as it sails over an interesting mixture of beefed-up krautrock and outrageous synth-lines. The lyrical content also bears the hallmarks of Reed’s work, circa Transformer era; as Francis introduces the curious guests at his house party, “here comes Rosie, he’s a tricky bitch,” one almost expects Sugar Plum Fairy to gatecrash.
Lovesick borrows the guitar riff from the Dandy Warhols Bohemian Like You to introduce a magnificently mischievous pop number that sees Clark urging us to, “listen to that devil on your shoulder.” Not since his collaboration with Kim Deal on the Pixies’ creative zenith Doolittle has Francis had such a positively charged relationship with a female musician; as he lasciviously enquires, “what are you wearing?” it’s clear that the couple are taking pleasure in their work. This devil-may-care attitude carries the album over potential pitfalls with grace and style; Fort Wayne’s‘ combination of glacial synths, Clark’s, “la la la la” harmonies and a casual slip into French lyricism could sound overbearingly precious, if they weren’t all delivered with a natural honesty and credibility that can only be attained by true lovers of music.
By the middle of the album, the competition is clearly on to see who can out do each other in the rock-out stakes. Black Suit finds Francis adopting his trademark Pixies snarl, as he delivers goose bumps to all listeners with a terrifying chorus, “The boy looks good in a black suit, we all know that he looks divine!” It would appear that his ability to both pleasure and disturb with a single line has not diminished with age.
However, Clark is no shrinking violet when it comes to the howling contest, as she proves when she takes up her position in front of the microphone for The Long Song. (The fact that the couple alternate turns as lead singer in a one on/one off fashion throughout the album is about as cute an example of true love as one will find in the post-grunge rock scene…) Her melodic shrieks and screams give Francis’s ex-sparring partner Deal a run for her money, marking a clear territorial circle around her new beau. The most beautiful parts of Clark’s singing are the instances in which she reaches for notes that she doesn’t quite hit, lending the album a gloriously DIY sensibility; this notion is enforced by the fact that the pair played all the instruments on the album, despite neither being, by their own admission, “expert players on all rock ensemble instruments.”
The album consists of only nine songs, employing the classic performance trick of leaving the listener wanting more. For our sake and theirs, let’s hope that their creative relationship doesn’t follow the long lineage of rock couples that implode under collaborative stress; although hearing how much fun they were having while making the record, they are more likely to go the way of John and June than John and Yoko.
