Raw, passionate distaste for the shiny, polished smell of fakery.
That has always been Songwriter Marc Montfleury’s M.O. - from his dystopic (and sometimes downright nihilistic) lyrics to his DIY style for which he has become fond of (low-fi, headphone mic resolution vocals, iPad sampled drums, and Jesus, the guy slays all the live instruments on these tracks...again) and you will find that James Dean Death Machine’s latest release does not disappoint.
I’m lucky to have known Montfleury’s work for nearly a decade and have had the opportunity to serve as colleague, peer, bandmate and critic to his music; his songs, especially when you get to hear them performed live, have made a permanent visceral impact on me. Montfleury’s voice, both tortured cry and lion-roar, is a refreshingly authentic tonality that harkens back to the time when rock and roll didn’t give a damn about what popular music had to say.
I was both surprised and elated to hear tracks on this record of songs I recognized from years past, ones I still know by heart.
Though I may have had a previous “relationship” with some of these songs, I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s Montfleury’s ability to portray intimacy - at its most alluring, or even at its ugliest - that makes you feel like you already know the tune.
“Leave A Pretty Corpse” lays hard into the subjects of its songs, and every track seems to dig into some kind of fatal flaw. “LA” is a fitting first track to set the scene, which from the first few seconds, catapults us into a very British Rock atmosphere (as is all the rage again; don’t The Kinks sell everything from iPhones to coffins these days?) but, all the while a kind of dangerous image of being told at knife point, “don’t you worry/you just look me in the eye”. It’s this power play idea that struts about in JDDM’s first track that beautifully represents Montfleury’s personality - he’s not gonna just tell you how it is, he’s gonna make you like it. It’s the kind of trait that might seem like a turn off, except he’s just so good at it. One can’t help but imagine these words coming out of the mouth of a leather clad rock and roll Demi-God.
But, it turns out this self-proclaimed protagonist has his own fatal flaw. And that flaw is love - the kind that makes you fall hard enough to leave scars, or worse. Pervasive in this album is the sentiment of loneliness, especially in the company of others: take the crossed wires of “It Pours” or the inner dialogue of “Shit Happens”; and you seem to watch the songwriter witness his own desperation with the subject of his admiration. One of my favorite things about both this album, and also of Montfleury’s larger work, is his ability to pepper this bittersweet sadness with his more upbeat, tongue-and-cheek bravado. It always makes for a wonderfully eclectic emotional rollercoaster, that colors what could have easily been an EP of just the latter.
My favorite track on this album is easily the fourth, “Tonight”, which gives you a mic more tender side of Montfleury’s side. “You’re so many different people/but tonight I get to know all of them” and “you woke up the world when you walked in the room” stand out as markers of how struck the songwriter can be - by beauty, by intimacy, by even just a presence.
I’m excited to see new material out by Marc Montfleury, though I am somewhat impatiently still waiting to hear a professionally recorded live album. The right mics, the right atmosphere, the right crowd, could be just what this songwriter needs to truly give his fans a morsel of what it’s like to experience these songs in person. But I can’t help but smile when I think of how much his self-produced stuff has to say about coming from the heart. Auto-tune, 6-figure recording budget be damned.
More on James Dean Death Machine at their website:
http://jamesdeandeathmach.wixsite.com/jddm
To read a review of one of Marc Montfleury’s previous records, click here.
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