Syndey Valette
I Fucking Love You
Artoffact Records
I Fucking Love You represents a pretty big swing for Paris’ Sydney Valette. Where his material has always leaned into the history of dignified continental darkwave, Valette has never been afraid to inject some urgency, emotion and a dollop of dry humor into the proceedings. For this record he’s kicked those instincts into overdrive, making the most lively and varied album of his career to date. It’s a tightrope to maintain his measured approach to composition and performance while also letting those qualities that have previously been around the edges take a more direct spotlight, and Valette walks it with confidence and skill.
Part of the record’s personality comes from how lively and ready to go the songs sound; not minimal by any means, but not overly ornamented or overworked. Opener “Warrior” is made up of a chirpy synth lead that has an almost futurepop sound, paired with a simple kick-clap drum pattern to drive it, his grave vocals, vocoder and samples from The Exorcist to fill it out. It’s effective because it’s simple and dramatic without seeming crass, a quality shared by such cuts as “Relèves-toi” whose mute pulsing bassline is punctuated by bursts of timpani and synthesized pipes, grand and even cinematic in scope, but not crowded or excessive. And when Valette really goes for the vocal gusto on the title track’s widescreen synthpop, dropping his often grave vocal delivery for a wounded croon and yelped and shouted backing, he keeps the speedy synths and drums behind him, giving himself the push and momentum for take-off.
Whether those canny arrangement and delivery choices are instinctual or the product of hours of work, they really do make I Fucking Love You the album it is. Russian language cut “Как Свеча” certainly has the gravity inherent to the language as sung, and chooses to lay back in delivering its chorus, creating a tension between its melancholic and funereal mood and its zippy tempo. In perhaps the album’s most ambitious moment, closer “No Ibiza For Mr. Valette”, he goes with a plainer vocal style and uses some of his dry humor to play off what is clearly a song of heartbreak, the song slowly graduating from simple synths and drums to lush pads. Like the rest of the album, what makes it great is how it communicates so much emotionally and thematically without needing to state anything openly, saying very little but telling us everything.
