Album Review: Balthazar – Fever


Fever



Sometimes change comes from gaining a different perspective.

Following the release of their moody third album, 2015’s Thin Walls, Balthazar main-men Jinte Deprez and Maarten Devoldere headed out for very different solo projects, the latter indulging in art-jazz as Warhaus whilst Deprez released the R&B flavoured Running Days under the handle J. Bernardt.

Reconvening, both realised that their mutual construct for the band had been shifted; with no musical grand vision they started work on songs with the simple brief of being not held to ransom by the past. If this blank canvas stymied creativity, Fever certainly shows no signs of it.

The titular opening track leads in gently over eight bars of rolling bass before Devoldere growls over a newer, funk channeling Balthazar that, in its boldness, makes to leave the constraints of indie-dom behind. This is, of course, is the kind of swagger that comes from being validated outside of your day job, one that elevates the Belgian quintet to a similar sort of plateau as Foster The People, or even stretching the premise a little just for fun, early Phoenix. For the first time we’re probably talking about bona fide potential hits here, a rich seam of bangers ranging from the brassy soul of Entertainment through the swish cocktail rock of Changes to the suave sax-laden MOR closer You’re So Real.

Stark contrast? Devoldere saw things a little more as business as usual: ‘Some songs felt like classic Balthazar pop songs…others a little chipper’. This shedding of the skin, it has to be said, is a little more remarkable than that, an evolution which the more recognisably old school Wrong Faces brings to life, the moribund words and downbeat tempo (the singer claims Leonard Cohen as a pervasive influence) as much like anything made in the dimly remembered ether of three years ago plus.

Even Lenny, in his own way, could bump and grind it though, a truth which probably casts little more than a tangential influence on Fever’s brain-seizing apex I’m Never Gonna Let You Down Again. A hymn to the joys of serial infidelity as a way of keeping a relationship together, it bubbles spectacularly with sardonic brio, a to-be-classic that gives you the blueprint for the plan that doesn’t need a plan.

What all this means is anyone’s guess. The Balthazar faithful may be either overjoyed or appalled or both, and these may be the reactions that its two main protagonists were entirely going for.

Whatever, Fever is a smart and polished record that proves a holiday from yourself is sometimes the most fun of all.

(Andy Peterson)


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