PIERRE de GAILLANDE

New Yorker 

Melomane, a Brooklyn-based collective known for intricate pop songs with chamber-music flourishes, sets up shop in this converted silo beside the Gowanus Canal to celebrate the release of its third CD, Glaciers. The singing, which is done by the Parisian-born front man Pierre de Gaillande and the bassist Daria Klotz, rises to adventurous peaks, and the rest of the band, a cellist, a keyboardist, a drummer, and often a violinist and cornettist gives the material a cinematic lushness. On Glaciers, the songs move with a deliberate force that befits the album's title. 

Punk Rock Academy

(Resolvo was one of the website's top 10 albums of 2000) One line sums up why I like these songs so much: 'I'm just a modern day Dean and Gene Ween on the rock and roll trail.' And that accurately summarizes (this recording.) ... These songs search for deeper transcendental meaning in music - the kind of meaning that Pavement and Yo La Tengo, among other bands, have tried to find in the wilds of three chords and red guitars - and stamp out stylistic chalk lines with their feet along the way. - Stephen Puckett  

BabySue.com 

Melomane is led by a Paris-born San Diego-raised gentleman named Pierre de Gaillande. Gaillande and company present a thoroughly mature and compelling batch of progressive pop tunes on Resolvo. The tunes feature wonderfully winding melodies...and Gaillande's utterly fantastic vocals carry the music to a heavenly level. This fellow's tunes are difficult to describe...and we can think of few comparisons to adequately explain what it sounds like. We played this CD over and over and over and over...and it just keeps getting BETTER with each and every listen. That is the mark of a truly credible collection of tunes...repeatability. The band incorporates guitars, synthesizers, keyboards, and more into a cool progressive soft pop sound that is almost impossible to dislike. Particular favorites include 'Fireflies,' 'All the Northern Birds,' 'Lazy Southern Song,' and the unbelievable beautiful 'Stay Awake.' This is a truly satisfying album. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. (Rating: 5+++) 

www.splendidzine.com 

Lets begin with an alphabetized list of bands and artists that NYCs Melomane has been compared to: 10cc, Lou Barlow, Beck, Calexico, Can, Leonard Cohen, Donovan, Duran Duran, Fugazi, Joe Jackson, Ennio Morricone, Nirvana, Pavement, Pixies, Spiritualized, Stereolab, Tindersticks, Tom Waits, Wings and Yo La Tengo. Yup, you counted right -- thats twenty separate musical entities, none of which has much to do with the others. Is this an act of extreme sonic hubris? Rampant overpromising? PR run amok? The funny thing is, as I listen to Solresol, none of the above name-checks seem to be all that egregious. So how does a band manage to evoke so many musical forebears at once? For starters, by jettisoning any pretense at having a core sound. Melomane is an eminently mutable combo, flitting from ye-ye pop to loungy cabaret without even a raised eyebrow. True, its all delivered with a dark, smoky vibe imported from the decadent jazz clubs of Paris (lead singer/songwriter Pierre de Gaillande is a native), but that could hardly be described as a unifying feature, especially after sampling the quirky, wildly eclectic offerings on display here. 'The Fighting Guitars' evokes the American West with weepy pedal steel and brushed drums, 'Far Out' dives in with crunchy guitars, and the title track seems beamed in from a Euro-Pop variety show circa 1966. For those of you playing spot-the-influence, check out the Pavementisms in 'Aria in D' and the Leonard Cohen-gone-jazz of 'Complicated Melody.' In truth, there's more to Melomane than globetrotting, pinch-of-this/dash-of-that fun. Both de Gaillande's literate lyrics and the band's tight musical chops elevate Melonmane above their peers, who so often treat genre-hopping as an end, not a means. Listeners seeking elegant pop that walks a fine line between high seriousness and goofy kicks will be nicely surprised by Solresol. At the very least, it's an excellent primer for the vast musical universe that Melomane calls home. - Ben Hughes 

Lucid Culture - CD Review: Melomane - Look Out! 

The long-awaited product of Melomane frontman Pierre de Gaillande's ongoing disaster song cycle is a masterpiece, not only one of the best albums of the year but of the entire decade. As good as their 2007 cd Glaciers was, this is even better: it's the New York art-rock band's greatest shining moment, in the studio anyway. Lushly orchestrated with layers of strings, guitars, keyboards and a propulsive rhythm section featuring the brilliantly melodic Daria Grace (also of the Jack Grace Band and her own, rustically romantic project Daria Grace & the Prewar Ponies) on bass, this cd looks at the apocalypse from many different angles, some of them as ominous as you would expect, some less so. Look Out! stares death square in the face: death by war, volcanic eruption, flood, global warming, collision with space junk and flame, at least metaphorically.  

The cd kicks off somewhat counterintuitively with the stately, blackly humorous The Shadow of Vesuvius, something of a noir cabaret number given a slowly bouncing rock treatment, marching along inevitably to its doom. The cd's second cut Darkness Rising, a brooding meditation on the logical extreme that a dictatorial regime leads to, is a long, intricate epic punctuated in places by searing, anguished, somewhat Gilmouresque guitar from multi-instrumentalist Quentin Jennings. The cd's best cut (and perhaps the band's best-ever track), O Mighty Orb begins with slow, pitch-black piano, markedly slower than the version the band plays live, building inexorably over a slinky, chromatic bassline, slashing keyboards bright against eerie reverberating guitar. Black humor comes to the forefront here again with the song's brutally sarcastic trick ending. 

Meteorite, a surprisingly gentle, countryish 6/8 ballad also begins quietly and builds, bass climbing against the guitar and vice versa: "The destruction of the whole human race brought by a glimmering shower," GaillandE muses stoically. After the scathing antiwar anthem Battlecat, a flamenco-inflected number in 5/4 time, the cd closes with Je Suis une Alumette (I Am a Match), a tongue-in-cheek song about the romance between a cigarette and a match, the Paris-born Gaillande's first-ever song in French. Guest vocalist Eleni Mandell is merveilleuse, and of course there's a laugh-out-loud if somewhat obvious musical joke when its moment arrives. 

Thirty years ago, bands this good, this intelligent and this enamored of soaring, epic grandeur would be all over FM radio and would be playing stadiums around the world. Until that happens again, you can get this cd online or at shows: Melomane play Thurs Oct 2 at the Bell House, 149 7th Street in Gowanus, Brooklyn, 9:30ish, on a bill also including the excellent M Shanghai String Band.

Lucid Culture CD review

Their best album. New York art-rockers Melomane have made the quantum leap from being a good band to being one of the best bands around. Their sound is lush, orchestrated and somewhat Mediterranean-inflected with meticulously arranged layers of guitars, strings, horns and keyboards. If you wish the Shins had some substance, if you’re wistful for Pulp at their mid-90s peak – or Roxy Music circa Avalon – this is for you. And while it’s a truism that this era’s musicians stand in opposition to the Cheney/Halliburton regime, Melomane have never shied away from taking a stand, as they do here more passionately and courageously than just about anyone else out there.

The cd opens with the blackly amusing Hilarious, a breezy art-pop song that evokes Crowded House. Frontman/guitarist Pierre de Gaillande blithely comes on to a girl while the climate and the arms race heat up on all sides. The next cut Unfriendly Skies has to be the best anti-entertainment industrial complex song written since Elvis Costello did Radio Radio almost thirty years ago. It’s a driving song, set to an ominous, driving beat, a fiery shot across the bow of corporate radio:

From unfriendly skies comes a dull monotony
To conquer and divide, entertainmentopoly
We drive so fast, we get so lost
I’ll turn it off
The channel’s clear, it gives me no alternative
One day soon I know
We will break the stranglehold
Hack apart the snake and
Take back what they stole

The cd continues with the darkly romantic Open Invitation and then Nobody, which takes a turn into tropicalia with its bossa rhythm, trumpet and strings. The next track, The Little Man’s Castles – a big hit at live shows – opens with a gorgeous, Byrds-style lick into a propulsive, backbeat-driven verse with trumpet and keys. There’s a nice bridge right before the outro featuring an all-too-brief, tersely melodic bass solo from Daria Grace (who also plays in her husband Jack Grace’s country band, and leads a charming old-timey outfit called the Prewar Ponies). The following cut This Is Skyhorse starts out totally early 80s new wave, with an acoustic intro into something that sounds like Turning Japanese by the Vapors, then bass and percussion, then back to the lick with distorted, processed vocals. And then it morphs into a bluesy 70s rock song. It’s a weird series of permutations that would do the Skyhooks proud. Could the song title be a cleverly veiled reference?

The high point of the cd, and instant candidate for best song of the year, no contest, is The Ballot Is the Bullet, a quietly ferocious, 6/8 rallying cry to any one of us who might find the courage to stand up to the traitors and thugs who brought us Guantanamo Bay and the Patriot Act:

You’re fodder and you’re grist
I think you get my gist
And you know these people don’t like you
They walk without souls
They’re turning our green world into a black hole
They’re out of their minds
We’ve run out of time
In the occident and the orient
Please assassinate the precedent

“Precedent” is what the lyric sheet says, anyway. Major props to Melomane for articulating what most of us never dare to speak. Out of the second chorus, the song builds majestically with a starkly powerful minor-key climb from Gaillande’s guitar, then the organ kicks in with a desperate, furious crescendo. The song then takes a bitter, depressed climb down to the intro and ends on the somber note where it began. And while Gaillande makes it clear that “We’re in love with love/That’s why we’re singing this,” it’s clear that this song is not about turning the other cheek.

Welcome comic relief arrives eventually with the pun-laden, tongue-in-cheek, Pistolla di Colla (Italian for “glue gun”). It’s a clever postmorten for the end of a relationship, evoking nothing less than artsy 70s Dutch satirists Gruppo Sportivo:

Some Roman gallivanter gifted in soothing banter
He’s cooing his sticky catchphrases while life decays in phases
She washed her hands and toes beneath the Caesar’s frescoes
With who, God only knows

Then they segue into a theme which will remain nameless here: you have to hear it to fully appreciate the joke. The following cut Thin Ice is a ballad: mournful harmonies fly over the quiet, reflective verse:

Plumbing the depths of the sadness that springs from confusion
And skating on thin ice

The album’s last song is anticlimactic to the extreme, but they saved it til the end so you can just stop there if that’s your preference.

Throughout the cd, Gaillande’s writing is more direct and hits harder than ever, and his voice has deepened, revealing a welcome, newfound gravitas. This is a terrific headphone album, a great road album and a shot of adrenaline for any disheartened freedom fighter. Five bagels. With arugula, prosciutto di Parma and capers. [postscript – after a hiatus that took up much of 2008 and 2009 as Gaillande busied himself with other projects, namely the Snow and Bad Reputation, Melomane seem to be at least a part-time project again, a welcome development]