Nathalie Matteau

REVIEW ‘BLOODY HANDS IN LOVE’ by Billy Sheppard

Monday, September 07, 2009
Nathalie Matteau “Bloody Hands In Love”

Damned Ecstasy

Then walks back to the table and sits
down with a sigh. He drops the match in the ashtray.
She reaches for his hand, and he lets her
take it. Why not? Where's the harm?
Let her. His mind's made up. She covers his
fingers with kisses, tears fall on to his wrist.

He draws on his cigarette and looks at her
as a man would look indifferently on
a cloud, a tree, or a field of oats at sunset.
He narrows his eyes against the smoke. From time
to time he uses the ashtray as he waits
for her to finish weeping.
~ From “The Ashtray” by Raymond Carver

“ Imagination is the loom on which we weave our souls. Ex nihilo, ‘out of nothing,’ we create the psyche, our inner life. The loom itself is fashioned of mystery, silence, darkness, our inner life. We wrestle with angels or devils for every piece of yarn and weave it in with sadness or joy.” ~ From Beyond Religion: A Personal Program for Building a Spiritual Life Outside The Walls Of Traditional Religion by David N. Elkins

Nathalie Matteau sings the hell out of love – damned, jaded, and stripped to the bone. Her music is European at the core, using blues and blue notes only for emphasis. A brilliant tuba takes the lowdown with a voice as nuanced the lace of smoke from an ashtray brimming with the smoldering embers torched after ecstasy. Her lyrics are as sparse, common, and brutally honest as Raymond Carver's stark poems and stories. This is music from another time and place to my ears – as though this recording were unearthed from Dresden or Vichy France under the rubble that buried the innocence of a culture. Matteau complains in earthy tones of the failure of fallen angels cut to the quick, feathers covered in cinders, shaken with a new found fear of flying. Her voice may be Carl Jung's libido shouting from a shallow grave.

I'm fascinated with the instrumentation of this album. The tuba as bass makes a powerful contribution. The songs seem like the rantings of a drama queen hanging onto the pain of disappointment too long and crying loudly in the hallway of an apartment building. It's the pain we all feel, but have the discretion or humility not to voice. These songs seem an extension or an antidote to notions of romantic love. They ask for dedication and fidelity in physical form, and border on sado massochism. It strikes me that this music is where the French and German notions of love come together. The basis of the music seems close to the Tango. Love is such a disruptive force! Passion and freedom are alternating impulses. It strikes me in her songs that we agree to be marked and altered by a love affair, and that there is a burning augury that scorches our soul when the ecstasy of initial passion is expected to intensify throughout the relationship.

To refuse the common logic of compromise as a relationship continues is tantamount to wrestling with an angel to demand a blessing. No good can come of that. These strident, jaded love songs of complaint from Nathalie refuse the wisdom of lowered expectations. She may be one who has seen the face of God and lived to find all other faces ugly, twisted and grotesque. Her femme fatale is darker for it's implied belief in a transforming, vibrancy in love. Matteau snuffs out love like a spent unfiltered Gitane on the nightstand as though life itself had failed to measure up to her expectations. Some soul music in America has as much emotion, but these torch songs have a deeper sting. Billie Holliday had a similar take on love, but a different and more languid style. Matteau's album is love that is likely to wake the neighbors at 3:00 a.m. It's unruly and beyond co dependent. It's a disaster and it's heaven on earth. I've been there, but prefer not to remember. Life's disappointments have led me to the maturity of acceptance. Nathalie's songs come from that desperate inner voice of a childhood fantasy demanding satisfaction into the minefield of middle age. The sweet sound of the blues incorporates the pain of disappointment into bittersweet compromise. Matteau's detailed, nuanced delivery of complaint against the failure of romantic dreams is the human tragedy of a psyche intent to demand the freedom of the romantic dream in practical, visceral, and permanent terms. These are the love songs of existential despair, not unlike the screaming argument from a neighbor's apartment at 3:30 a.m. after a brutal, drunken Saturday night.

I approached an interview with Nathalie Matteau over Skype between Quebec and Ohio with considerable curiosity. She is a charming and vibrant French redhead with an expressive voice in conversation. She was once in the running as a TV weather girl, and studied the Sanford Meisner technique with thoughts of becoming an actress. The world has given her opportunities to be seen and make money, but she rejecting acting as “false.” Matteau found her best expression as a singer.

Matteau did not find a market for her music in Quebec sufficient to support the songs, so she looked elsewhere. She found her musicians in The Netherlands. I asked drummer Kees Swanenberg what attracted him to this music, and he wrote “The voice!” There is something magical in Nathalie Matteau's choices. The musicians of “Les Hommes Perdue” are expressive musicians who share her vision. I believe Nathalie Matteau and Les Hommes Perdue have found a collective voice to express the unfiltered desire most commonly threatened by reality into to mute submission. I am not tempted to fly into this destructive flaming passion. Not really. It's scary. I have to admit a part of my existential psyche is dancing wildly to the tunes on this album. This album gives voice to my very own Merry Prankster, however comfortable I may profess to be with what is possible from earthbound love affairs.

Nathalie shouts down the pitiful possibilities of earthly passion with all the power of Edith Piaf, Lotta Lenya, Bille Holiday and Dore Previn. Through all the dark emotion of this album, I sit here smiling in relief that someone has managed to give a voice to that forbidden cauldron of hope long since dashed into submission. This darkness makes me smile.

Kees Swanenberg deserves the final word on this singer. He wrote the following in an email before heading off to an appointment:

Weill, Piaf and Brel are big influences of Nathalie... two artists of big gestures! I do not master French well enough to comprehend most of Piaf's words, but it's not hard to feel life wasn't a picnic for Piaf. Since Brel was actually a Francophone Belgian from Flanders (Yes! It's a complicated schizophrenic little country!) he did a lot of his famous songs in Dutch too... and those lyrics are absolutely amazing... a lot of his songs are social comments... protests against the petty bourgeois middle class hypocrisy of the Belgian society of the 30's to 60's... put to words in a very eloquent and striking manner. I love him! Brel rules big time... most people who cover him fall through the thin ice and drown! But not Nathalie! With her colossal voice like a mountain shivers run up and down my spine when she sings ‘Les Bourgeois’ in our set... her ‘disgust’ is heartfelt when she sings that song!

photo © Brendan van den Breuken