Shortly after Christmas this last year, I went record shopping with a couple of my best friends (and best music friends) to emancipate the money locked inside my newly-recieved gift certificates. While hazily sifting through the so-called "Rock" section of vinyl, I aimlessly ran across the file card for Sylvain Chauveau. Most delightfully, there were actually two pieces of wax there for my delectation; Nuage and The Black Book of Capitalism. Any knowledge of the latter had escaped me and I jumped at the "discovery" of a seemingly secret new Chauveau album. I listened to it four or five times before even filing it away on my shelves, pulling it out again later for the purpose of review.  Only, there was one disappointment waiting around the corner for me...

This is not actually a new album from Chauveau. Le Livre Noir Du Capitalisme (the original French title) was first released back in 2000, but it made such a small ripple that hardly anybody knew of it.  Apparently, the label that Chauveau was on at the time had extremely limited range and funds with which to promote and distribute the album. Back in the present, Type Records has seen fit to re-master and re-release this fine and hidden gem. Sometimes, a piece of art or music is so loosely tied, if at all, to its point of origin in time, that we are freely able to discuss it without regard to chronology. Moreover, learning all of this only after forming many opinions about the album also seems to detract from any argument against reviewing it now, for it is at this moment that the light of this star is seen from the distance of its birth.

In fact, the only temporal anchor marking the depths for this album is its namesake. Published in 1998, the book The Black Book of Capitalism was a response by a community of French thinkers and writers to a book from the year before, called The Black Book of Communism. The initial text reads as a lengthy obituary column and the rebuttal is more philosophical. Fitting, as Chauveau’s music brings a philosophical tone to every dolorous sweep of a cello or piano vamp.

The Black Book of Capitalism opens with a mid-tempo piano lament that drifts atop strings that sound dusty and looped somewhere between Jan Jelinek and the RZA. The tinny, electrical horn that careens over the top is inspiring the way that an Army recruiting commercial is enraging; the allusion to propaganda is not lost in its tone. Immediately following is “JLG”, a determined piano piece that surely fits into a rotation with Goldmund and Dustin O’Halloran. “Le Marin Rejete Par La Mer” begins with twenty seconds of stark obsolescence, but quickly morphs into an interlopers’ dance between cello, piano and hummed, non-verbal vocals. This track seems to be the emotional centerpiece of the record; the place where the adventurer in capitalism can always return to gather the self together again before going back outside. As the next leg of the journey begins with “Derniere Etape Avant…”, a chugging engine of staccato strings and rejuvenated energy push along safely by the coastline with a lush, resilient French horn guiding the way. “Dialogues Avec Le Vent” takes a slight turn towards Rodan’s “Bible Silver Corner” with the robust, clearly toned guitar played in a contemplative gear. Some of what is most amazing about this album are the elements I least expected from an effort by Chauveau.

The vocals on “Ses Mains Tremblent Encore” are shockingly beautiful sweeps of humming and moaning that instantly recall the stylings of Thom Yorke. Even the simple piano line and faint, skittery, dusty electronics that underpin the vocals are redolent of Radiohead. At some point in making all these comparisons, I begin to wonder if I’m leading my reader into a fit of mania while struggling with balancing such various styles and influences on one record. But that is just the thing that makes this a fabulous record: Chauveau is able to evoke all these things in one listener’s mind and still maintain a fluid whole. This is an album that demands to be taken seriously as an organism of its own, beyond just being an amalgam of its parts.

Yet, seeing that The Black Book of Capitalism is not a new record, that in fact it is Chauveau’s first, I wonder if his following albums have come to fruition through a tighter focus on particular styles and compositional models. I do feel that Nuage and Des Plumes Dans La Tete are fantastic albums, but less daring and with a slightly more constrained narrative. Hard to say, though, since I have, after all, experienced them “out of order.”

-Gabriel Bogart