que sera

Que Sera will drive you mad if you let them but you can save yourself if you know their one code-cracking super-secret: they’re not really a band. They’re a music borg. They’re an evolutionary leap.

They’re a mutant hybrid she-male rock regime of interlocking parts...hypnotizing you and beckoning you down dark corridors, into bright caves, humming with late-night industry, clanging with third-rail train-rhythm lullabies.

You will not hear them speak such things. You won’t hear them speak at all, except through sweet black crushing melodies layered with lush guitars and crooned words and chunky beats and hopeful echoes of recalled sound.

You know their voice: the throaty, hard-candy female growl that could almost be Kim Gordon or Karen O or Marlene Dietrich...but now it’s a man, and he’s too American to be Morrissey, too wistful to be Ian Curtis, and too alive to be Jesus.

You know the undeniable, pulsing bass that shakes all your itches ‘til they’re scratched, but ducks if you look at it head-on.

You know every twist in their lyrics...from giddy discovery and night-driving loneliness, to squirmy love and the persistence of melancholy and the inevitability of regret...and yet no one’s ever said it quite this way: enigmatic art-stars speaking simple syllables, unpretentious as shoes.

And just when you think that you know what will be - that you’ve found your feet, cherchez’ed Le Sera - they transmogrify and take you down the rabbit hole again. And there you go, dream-dancing after the siren songs of a seamlessly human rock robot, drifting across another soundscape on steel wheels, learning a new language that’s really the mother tongue of your home country, long ago left behind.

And just when you’ve sighed your way into borg-bliss at last, Que Sera kisses you goodbye and you wake, reaching out for more as they melt away.

- Esther B. Langs
Los Angeles
2.7.06