The Lacking Permanence

At a time when we need the positive carefree sound of French yeh-yeh the most, April March comes through with a spicy new number.

Tonight started out with an hour of the sickest music around, which is to say songs about illness, medication, and other health-related issues. The following two hours were the usual incomprehensible mixture of genres and bad attitudes.

Exquisite rock and roll, filled with bombastic drenches of reverb and enough monster riffs to fill a stadium, powering through sounds psychedelic, surf-like, and power-chording, but with enough dynamics to keep it from becoming exhausting.

A near-dozen electrolatinized hits, not all of them latinamerican in origin but all of them served as tremendously smart interpretation, from a mostly-marimba “Maniac” (from Flashdance) to the sparse cumbia of Prince’s “Beso”.

It’s dense and it feels implacable, yet at the same time it’s sweet and comforting, like a punked-out beach blanket bingo, with cascading fuzz pedals and the feeling that the next wave is going to crest even higher.

Really, this review only needs five words: Francophone spaghetti western rock songs.

It’s like a solo bedroom funk-pop project, with all its trappings (spur-of-the-moment compositions, absurdist themes, flashes of intense brilliance), except it comes from two people. These songs will quickly settle into your head and raid the fridge.

The Fogerty Brothers are putting their upbringing to good use in the genuinely psychedelic outfit Hearty Har, parsing the electric sitars and paisleys of long ago into a legitimate translation.

This takes backing tracks from “This Year’s Model” and adds new Spanish-language lyrics and vocals on top. It’s a bewildering mix of the extremely familiar and the completely new, and if you speak the language, the lyrical translations are top notch.

The female vocals have a child-like quality, and the bass-forward music hulks behind it, sometimes like a princess’ bodyguard, sometimes like a delicate clockwork contraption.