2 out of 5

Label: Computer Students

Produced by: Retroengineering

There is the accomplishment of Chevreuil’s ‘Stadium’ – the duo’s 15-years-later double LP return, jumping right back in to their art rock brutalization of instrumental math rock while moving their very specific practice forward at the same time – and then there’s… actually listening to it. Which I’m split on – no pun intended; pun to be explained – because Chevreuil has always had a bit of a learning curve, and the core sound of Julien F.’s confident but loose drumming and Tony C.’s militant but chaotic guitar work is absolutely intact, but… I’m just not sure how much I’m actually listening to this thing, or just being present while it’s on.

Chevreuil’s approach is somewhere between intention and improv: the group has their steady-states and beats to hit, but they’re also reactive, Tony and Julien playing off of each other as Tony records guitar loops, played back live via amps surrounding them; it’s precisely controlled noise. There’s something inherently anti-listener about that, perhaps, leaning into the music being an experiment, but it’s not like the two weren’t concerned with rocking out and giving us the mathy goods, they just came around to it roundabout. And once / if you found the wavelength, you were hooked.

‘Stadium’ adds “a reconfigured … hybrid electro-acoustic [guitar] capable of generating electronic timbres,” and no, I have no idea what that means. But alongside liner notes that list very exacting technical details for each song, and a pitch to play both sides of the record at the same time (something which I can’t figure out is real or trolling; neither song times or the total times of the sides line up…), and even the album title being indicative of a larger performance, all of this starts to suggest we’ve tipped more full, if not nigh-wholly, into the art side of things.

Chevreuil is still there, with this “electro-acoustic” evolution adding a kind of proggy, spacey frontier that can be witnessed in force on a massive, spanning track like ‘Profundis’; or on ‘Aria’ we have a relatively back-to-basics rocker that stays the course. These moments are very spread out though, lending credence to the “play both sides at once” theory, as tracks start and end and change tactics rather randomly, in a fashion that feels like the duo is not necessarily responding / reacting to their own playback, but rather to some internal algorithm to which we’re not witness, and cannot understand without a lesson in music theory. It’s an art show put on for an audience behind a curtain in another room. We listeners at home are next door, hearing some occasional racket and peeking through our own curtains with interest – ‘Stadium’ is surely interesting – but we can’t see the players, or their hidden audience, and ultimately let our curtain drop back into place, content to nod along at the occasional bleats of guitar and beats in the background.