St. John’s scene sweethearts Liz Fagan Band (LFB) brought a dynamic Francophone twist to the local indie rock catalogue on October 3 with their debut album The LFB LP.
Having mastered suspenseful, sonic peaks-and-valleys with fuzzed-out French lyrics sandwiched between synth and warped guitar, LFB members Liz Fagan, Kendall Pittman, James Benoit, and Chad Feehan are ecstatic for listeners to hear the new record after rave reviews of their first EP, Leaning In/Se pencher vers, released last March.
The band’s first full-length record has many moving parts – almost as many as their upcoming tour, which kicked off with a release show at the Peter Easton in St. John’s, supported by punk trio Sick Puppy, and Miller Timethousand, an offshoot of jazz/hardcore band Killer 9000.
LFB plans to hit 12 Canadian cities east of Toronto.
With The LFB LP, Fagan draws listeners into their lyrical inner-world where everyone is bilingual, gender nonconformity is salvation, and yearning is practically currency.
Bilingual indie rock? Sign me up!
It’s not every day you see a bilingual indie rock band.
Leaning In/Se pencher vers reads more like a “split” in this way, offering up a couple of songs in English and some in French. The LFB LP takes a different approach, employing more “Franglais” elements in a few songs.
“Lukewarm L’eau tiède” in particular oscillates between both languages, creating an almost conversational effect between the speaker and themselves.
Lead singer Liz Fagan cites increased comfortability with the melding of these two language worlds as the basis for this decision.
“I really love French, and it kind of became a safe space for me. I felt safer in a French-speaking work than I did in an English one.” Fagan said.
“The whole French thing is a really deeply intertwined piece of me emotionally, so I know that I wanted to have French stuff in the band… In the EP …it was very separated and polarized.”
“It felt a bit limiting,” the singer continued. “Even though I live a huge chunk of my life in French… I’m getting more comfortable in English now… so what’s been feeling more natural for this album is to write songs that are blendy.”
Indulging ‘what ifs’ on The LFB LP
This record details a clear maturation from the EP (which I must clarify, is still fantastic), not just lyrically, but from a musical and production standpoint as well.
Self-produced and recorded by drummer James Benoit, the band took a less reserved approach with The LFB LP, letting themselves indulge their songwriting fantasies.
“Going into the recording, we had much bigger ideas,” said Benoit.
“When we recorded the EP, it was like… ‘we just need to put it out.’ Going into it this time, we were like, ‘What if, what if, what if?’ And I think we filled out all of those ‘what if we made this part cooler?’ things to enhance the songs,” said Benoit.
“[Songwriting] is mostly an intuitive process, I don’t know if there’s any intentional curation of vibes, they just kind of happen,” says longtime musician and powerhouse bassist Ched Feehan.
“Liz brings some ideas to us, and then we collectively flesh them out to where they need to be… when I’m writing, I’m kind of just doing it for what the song needs, rather than trying any intentional thing – I think most of it is unconscious.”
If you listen to it in order – which you should do anyway – the narrative trajectory of the record strikes playful highs and melancholic lows, offering tunes apt for any emotional state. Jazzy opening track “Whoops, Sheryl,” which may sound familiar to some fans, contrasts devastating ballad closer “One Arm Embrace” beautifully.
Synth player Kendall Pittman puts it perfectly: “It really goes from dancing in the club to crying in the club… especially between the start and end, that’s how I sum up the album in one phrase.”
Representation versus tokenization as a musician
When bands are fronted by women, queer people, POC folks, and/or transgender/non-binary people, they are often labelled as ‘[insert marginalized identity] -fronted band.’
Don’t get it twisted, representation and visibility are incredibly important, but this method of labeling can sometimes tokenize and reduce a band that simply happens to have marginalized musicians in it to one singular identity, disregarding their creativity, personhood, and how much the music just genuinely rocks, for some diversity points.
Liz Fagan, who identifies as non-binary/transmasculine, has given this paradox a lot of thought, saying, “…I think that there is a lot of importance in being visible. I think that’s really powerful, but I also believe that some of the most powerful awareness you can do is just to make it a non-issue.”
“I kind of carry these two beliefs where one of them is like, yes, loud, proud, don’t give a f*ck, and then the other side is like, it doesn’t matter.”
“We’re a bilingual rock band, not a non-binary rock band,” said Benoit, who also identifies as non-binary. Fagan repeated an unexpectedly empowering statement they heard Benoit say before – “it’s not the most interesting thing about us.”
Listen to The LFB LP here.
