The Bewitched Hands

A presentation by François Ducray (rock critic – used to work for Actuel and Rock & Folk /author of biographies on Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Serge Gainsbourg..)

Have you heard of Casanova? He seduced over a thousand women but fell in love less than ten times! One wonders if it’s a cold ratio or just plain boasting. But we rock critics are undeniably pop music’s Casanovas: after writing a thousand articles, how many lasting ecstasies are we left with, how many real discoveries? Not a lot…

As far as I’m concerned, I thought I’d had my share. Last time, it was Cat Power’s “You Are Free”. But here it is again, this vertiginous feeling, this rare tingling that takes over my whole body when music fills me with wonder, twists my insides and stupefies my senses to the point where I just KNOW: the music is so fresh and filled with color, rich and full of adrenalin, that it just makes so much sense all of a sudden. And I’m wondering how I’ve lived without it this whole time… Without, for instance, the Velvet Underground, almost my whole life! Now I’m asking myself how I lived without The Bewitched Hands!...

It happened to me before with bands of totally different styles, like Roxy Music and the Sparks on one side, Talking Heads and French band the Rita Mitsouko on the other. Four debut albums (except for the Sparks, that was their third album) full of passion, boldness and innate elegance. Four debut albums with flamboyant personalities, full to the brim with songs made of pop flesh and rock muscle, of songs so amazing they acquired the level of success of the Beatles, the Kinks or Gainsbourg during his Golden Age. Four debut albums announcing four unprecedented careers. And I saw it happen, as true as I went into trances listening to Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks”, Lou Reed’s “Berlin” and Robert Wyatt’s “Rock Bottom”, and wrote about it, that’s my legacy!...

The Bewitched Hands On Top Of Our Heads, episode 1, debut album by this Reims-based sextet.

The striking thing about this band when you first listen to it is the deluge of guitars (three guitars with different tones) and a torrent of voices (solo, as a pair, as a trio, all together, they all sing) and through all this they manage to pull together an inventive and breathtaking melody. Now this is very hard to achieve, we are flirting here with the level of Nirvana’s “Lithium”! But they don’t stop at that: it’s often more than one melody rising, two, sometimes three melodies come out of a cascade of short verses that all come together in one lethal chorus. You get lost in the former and hooked on the latter. It’s the Beach Boys effect, recently reactivated by Blur and the Strokes: mini-symphonies, so supple and fluid that they hit you as hard as they enfold you. It’s a beachcomber (16 tracks) of splendid magical sound…

Their live act is also mesmerizing! But with the Bewitched Hands’s album, it’s like having SEVERAL albums all in one, bless these guys (and girl, there’s five guys and one girl, and they all compose)! And each time that I get startled by the end of the album, like I’m emerging from a dream, I think of Lennon’s innocent question about Motown, which he so loved: “It’s so beautiful, how do they do it?...”. One answer comes to me from Charles Trenet: “Y a d’la joie!” (There’s so much joy!). Not only, but it’s true, there’s a lot of joy everywhere in their music from the open-sea. And it’s pretty rare, these days…

So ok, there’s that weird name of theirs, that comes from lands far away from their home, where their music will be taking them. And their career will be mighty long, I promise you. But don’t listen to me, listen to their music and see for yourselves. It’s all there…

The Bewitched Hands On The Top Of Our Heads
Debut album to be released in 2010.