Trying to label the music French artist Sébastien Tellier has been making so far through his career can be a very tricky affair. On one hand, you can go simple and label him electro-pop – high-quality at that – and file him alongside other prominent high-quality electro-pop French artists like Air and Daft Punk.
Yet, when you start sifting through his seven albums proper and four film soundtracks he has released in 25 years so far, you can hear an undeniable variety in sounds he incorporates in his music from sophisticated dance floor bangers to detailed pop, ambient and more, all tied up neatly in fully-formed album concepts, each differing, sometimes slightly, sometimes quite radically from each other.
Summed up, it’s all turned out to be a general concept of moving the boundaries of pop a song and an album at a time, presenting Tellier as a sort of, using a French term, agent provocateur, or inciting agent. Participating as a French represenatative at Eurovision (2008) and creating an album for Dita Von Teese were notable moments, and he even had a stranger steal his identity a few years back, the whole package making him a celebrity in both France and elsewhere.
Now, six years after his previous release (Domesticated, 2020), Tellier is back with Kiss The Beast; another album that keeps on subverting the idea what widely acceptable pop (in any shape and form) should sound like. Each of the 12 tracks here are packed with layers of intricate musical details that sometimes don’t even sound appropriate, but fit the other parts like a silk glove.
Take the case of the opening title track for example. It opens like an 80s electro epic with vocoder-like vocals, then switches between acoustic piano and electronics to present its melody and theme, with subtle underlying beats and multi-tracked vocals. Sounding like a disaster waiting to happen as it reads on paper, it actually moves along with ease.
Then there’s “Thrill of the Night”, a recent single that featuring Slayyyter on vocals and Nile Rodgers on guitar. The moment the track starts you realize what Rodgers is doing here, with the song possibly being a homage to the master with its hard to define rhythmic patterns that stick to ears with so much ease anyway – sophisticated in every sense of the word and still fully cleared for the dance floor.
The best example what Tellier is trying to do here might be “Loup”, the penultimate track on Kiss The Beast. It starts out with Spanish guitar making a modern French pop chanson, and then suddenly turns into pyched-out funk akin to something Prince was doing on his Around A World In Day album, switching back to chanson again and back, with the ending sounding like a chorus finaizing an epic opera.
So, it seems that kissing the beast has done wonders for Tellier, he has come up with another pop subversion that works on every level.
