- Let’s get the large, grey animal in the room out of the way. Requin is French for shark and you can pronounce that reh-khan, Francais-ing it up as much as you like. People will probably judge you. Why are they called that? Well a couple of the soon-to-be band members were in a fish-and-chip store and encountered an ancient television there, glitching uncontrollably between The Price Is Right and a French news report about a shark attack. One of them said,
“what if we had a math-rock band and called it Requin?” They both giggled at the silly joke -how pretentious would that be?- and then went out and formed the band.
I really have thought, yeah, this is what a band called Requin should sound like and, well, I actually liked it. Sure, there is pretension and absurdity; and there’s the suburban boredom of the fish-and-chip shop; and the summer heat; and you may almost miss it, lost in the murky waters, but there’s a menace, a viciousness, haunting the background too.
It’s interesting, in an interview earlier this year, the band namechecked a number of influences and with almost no exceptions none of them were math-rock a-la Battles, instead choosing a slew of seriously po-faced, indie-art-folk-rock-pop bands, from Fleet Foxes through Mothers, Grizzly Bear, Deer Hunter, Palms, Sufjan Stevens and Belle & Sebastian. The one exception was US band Pattern Is Movement who are sort of half math and half all that indie-arty stuff. If you have a gander in that direction, that’s where you’ll find Requin, too.
Across the five cuts on their debut EP, The Noisy Miners Swoop Him -a title which promises more of that suburban heat and aggression- there’s sweetness and passion sure, but the overall mood is one of … anxiety? Neurotic control? Like the happiness of pop is grabbed by the neck and dragged down. The mood ends up neutralised, uneasily quiet. It’s quite post-punk: if you put a restraining order on Shellac they might sound like this.
The mournful lyrical appeals are delivered in sweet voices, but also in snatches and fragments repeating lines like “I got lost ticking boxes”, or “I’ve got the message, I should be leaving…” and “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” The real emotion leaks out in sections of the music largely lyric free, delivered instead by vocalises, pounded drums and sudden outbursts of guitar. These owe more to post-rock than anything else, although again they are ruthlessly circumscribed by the band’s emotional discipline. This isn’t the over-the-top display of a Mono or Sigur Rós.
Requin are many things, often inwardly focused and warring against each other. These subtle, elusive qualities can be muted and hard to grab hold of, but The Noisy Miners Swoop Him is never colourless. You can think of the sound as grey: the colour of shark skin: subtly scaly, occasionally glinting, cold, clammy and abrasive to the touch.
- Chris Cobcroft.