Here's a bonus Late Night Music Club. Today is Bastille Day, and I can think of no better way to celebrate than with Les Thugs, the band closest to my heart.
Angers, France's Les Thugs have put out more records on Sub Pop records than most of their roster, and have probably sold the least. Thankfully, Sub Pop was always happy to let their bigger bands subsidize the quartet's superior mix of shoegaze and garage-punk. From a great article in the Seattle Weekly last summer, when Sub Pop convinced them to get back together to play for the Sub Pop 20th anniversary, and I got on a plane and slept on my friend's couch for a weekend:
"They were really, really intense, and really fun to watch. I was just riveted for half an hour," [Sub Pop founder Jonathan] Poneman recalls of the band's explosive performance. And yet, he says, "There's an almost shoegaze quality to what they do. It's punk rock in spirit and execution, but there's also something very hypnotic about [it]." (snip)
Fortunately, Sub Pop got back on its feet in time to release As Happy As Possible, a record Poneman believes is Les Thugs' "defining album" as well as one of his all-time favorite Sub Pop releases. And yet, Poneman says, "Les Thugs have played [in the U.S.] several times, and they've never drawn much of a crowd." Unfortunately, the band's formidable underground success in France as a pioneering punk-rock band never translated to the United States.
But for the band, it was a very different experience, one few other French bands shared. "At that time, we couldn't imagine what would happen for the band," Christophe Sourice says from his home in the suburbs of Angers, France. "We were already so happy to play outside of Angers, and then we started touring France, then we started touring England, and then the U.S.! There was not one French band who toured U.S. like we did."
While Poneman didn't exactly expect Les Thugs to become the next global sensation, he was disappointed and surprised that the band's music—especially As Happy As Possible, which he considers one of local producer Kurt Bloch's finest achievements—didn't get more attention from an American audience. "It is one of the great puzzlements of my professional career, why that record didn't get more reviews and didn't do better," Poneman muses.
This clip is the leadoff track of said album. As Happy As Possible is a dense, difficult and beautiful hour of psychedelic punk in a second language with more complexity and depth than anything their American peers were making at the time; at least that's what I and a handful of others think. Amazon has one used for 0.45 cents here. The best things in life are free, and some things that come damn close cost less than half a buck.
Well that's it. If you've read this far, thanks for letting me gush about my totally ungushed-over favorite band. Any other great French musicians you want to celebrate this Bastille Day?
