Four years after Beaucoup de plaisir, Drummondville, Quebec, four-piece Les Trois Accords bring their recipe of humorous tales of love, the quirks of everyday life, and colourful exoticism to Présence d’esprit, their seventh album. They once again enlisted the help of producer Gus van Go and, for the first time, headed to his studio in Toronto. “The idea was to go into the studio with all our wits about us, and finally be together again, both physically and mentally,” the band’s lyricist and lead singer Simon Proulx tells Apple Music. With cover art depicting an old computer and featuring a type face that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a poster for a high school audiovisual club in the '90s, Présence d’esprit is a playful foray into their long-standing musical influences, from Weezer (“Vedette pop”) to The Cure (“Visite nocturne”). “It sounds very nostalgic at times. It’s somewhat grunge-inspired, but we also used Dr. Dre-style sounds,” says guitarist Alexandre Parr. Here the two musicians present the album track by track.
Internet
Alexandre Parr: “You get the impression sometimes that the Internet is a vague concept, so we wanted to explain it properly. It’s important for us to inform people. Basically, our music is a public service. Because it’s a signature tune, we found a powerful image for the album cover art to aptly represent it, something we’ve often done in the past.”
Simon Proulx: “I have to admit that, for me, it’s a pretty intense song, a bit wilder, so I had no idea just how well it would go down with the guys [Parr, drummer Charles Dubreuil, bassist Pierre-Luc Boisvert and producer Gus van Go]. Like several tracks on Présence d’esprit, it started off with what we considered to be a strong bass line and then we built the melodies around that.”
Costume de bain
SP: “I wanted it to be really simple, just a love song, in fact. It describes that feeling everyone has when they fall in love, that is to say when you think you’re the only person in the world to have ever experienced it. Except here, the person falls in love with their bathing suit. Being passionately in love with an object is something that’s never happened to me before, but I’d like it to happen one day.”
AP: “We used a baritone guitar, which we’ve only ever done on ‘Elle s’appelait Serge’ [Dans mon corps, 2009]. The rest of the guitars on the album are higher-pitched, so it gives the song a distinctive sound.”
Le matin
SP: “Once again, I think we address a topic that’s fairly central to what we do: self-acceptance, of who we are, of what we look like. It’s just another expression of that desire to be accepted by the other person for who we are. When the line ‘C’est de ça que j’ai l’air le matin’ [That’s what I look like in the morning] popped into my head, I had the feeling I’d never heard it before in a song. It seemed powerful to me. It’s a super danceable tune and I can’t wait to perform it live.”
Vol à l’étalage
AP: “I think this is one of our really good tunes, and we managed to arrange as if we were a band from the southeastern United States. ‘Le vol à l’étalage’ [Shoplifting] is a little afternoon activity that goes wrong. We keep on saying to each other that we should have gone to the library. In other words, we’re working on prevention.”
SP: “We have a couple of songs that are inspired by things people we know have experienced. They’re the most vivid and colourful on the album. This one’s very pop, it makes you feel like dancing, like performing a routine, wearing a silk shirt unbuttoned down to here [pointing to the middle of his chest].”
Visite nocturne
AP: “There’s a type of visitor that never shows up when you’re expecting them: a visitor from outer space. For example, you often forget to add that extra place setting at the table…”
SP: “… And you don’t always have your tin foil hat close at hand, if you know what I mean.”
AP: “This one evokes a house party, with the pulsing lights, the loud music. I really miss those days.”
SP: “It’s the first one I played with the guys. We debated whether we’d made it clear enough that it’s a song about an alien or if it came across as simply a song about a visitor. I thought it was cool to be a bit vague. It started out as something fairly acoustic, with very earthy notes, to put it in oenological terms, but later, when Alex came up with his riff, he asked us for a specific sound and his line sounded exactly the same as it does on the album. It was perfect, very The Cure. It worked well with the track’s ambiance and somewhat mysterious vibe. There was a real sense of excitement in the studio when everything fell into place and we got the result we were looking for. We were really pleased.”
Pâté chinois
SP: “I wasn’t too sure I’d present this one at first. It’s quite hard to play, we’re not used to being in that range, but the guys liked it, so we started working on it. We tried several different things before coming up with this final version, which is very simple, gentle, stripped down. We wanted all the emphasis to be on the lyrics. Pâté chinois [Shepherd’s pie] is a real family meal, one that’s part of everyday life. When you go off to university and your parents prepare those little meals for you, it’s an act of love. And later, you do the same for others. It’s a perpetual cycle.”
Piscine hors terre
AP: “When we were recording it in Toronto, we realized that many of the features in our backyards have Italian names: veranda, pergola, terrazzo.”
SP: “I don’t know what went on between Italy and the backyard, but we thought it was important to talk about it. We could say it’s our first song in Italian!”
AP: “It’s Simon who composed the solo on his acoustic guitar. He recorded it on his phone and then put it on his laptop in GarageBand. We steered as far away as possible from the principles of good sound recording, but the result is a truly unbeatable sound. It’s perfectly imperfect.”
Vedette pop
SP: “It talks about the vegetation in India, Bengal tigers, crocodiles in the Ganges, which have a lot of very visible teeth. The person in the song is unhappy with his situation and pictures himself as an Indian animal, in India. It’s a pop star who’s having a weird day at the office. He’s always being told what to do and he’s a bit fed up. Lots of people would love to be in his place, but on that particular day, he wishes he was elsewhere.”
AP: “It’s a tune with five modulations so it was hard to learn, but I managed to master it not that long ago. We’d started this with ‘Retour à l’institut’ on the [2012] album J’aime ta grand-mère. It conveys the character’s mounting frustration, as he becomes more and more like a wild animal who’s blood is boiling.”
Ouija
AP: “This song is really funny. It all stems from the line ‘Étiez-vous la seule morte disponible?’ [Were you the only dead person available?], a question asked by people playing the Ouija board. Throughout the song, we alternate between two keys, to show that it’s a dialogue. In the end, the players realize that the deceased actually died doing the same thing they’re doing. It doesn’t end well. Ouija is a dangerous game.”
Hypnose
AP: “It talks about our dream of one day becoming hypnotists, after taking a course on the Internet. It closes the loop with the first track on the album.”
SP: “It’s a true story. It’s also a very eclectic song in terms of the music. I’d brought a storyboard to the studio that already included lots of different things and we decided to add even more elements that drew on various influences. There’s flamenco guitar, hand clapping… stuff we don’t usually integrate into our songs, but which together, turned it into a Trois Accords tune. And it ends with an instrumental bit that we’d very much like a rapper to steal from us one day.”