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Reviews

Patrick Broguière — Châteaux de la Loire
(Bandcamp Gimmick Productions GP 702, 2000, CD / DL)

Patrick Broguière — A Secret World
(Bandcamp no#, 2023, CD / DL)

by Jon Davis, Published 2023-08-28

Châteaux de la Loire Cover artA Secret World Cover art

Here at Exposé, our last reference to Patrick Broguière was back in 1999, with the review of his fourth album, Mont Saint-Michel, after which we seem to have lost track. Broguière’s follow up to that album was Châteaux de la Loire in 2000, but it’s only now in 2023 that we’ve got some new music from him. We’ll take this opportunity to cover both. Châteaux finds him in essentially one-man-band mode, with a set of nine mostly-instrumental pieces bridging rock with Renaissance (the era, not the band) music. If you can imagine Rick Wakeman’s Six Wives of Henry VIII crossed with Gryphon’s Red Queen to Gryphon Three and (sorry for the obscure reference) Madame la Frontière by the Breton folk-rock band Ys, you’ll be in the general area. Tracks like “Pavane des Bâtisseurs et Saltarelle” take the traditional pavane style with recorders, crumhorns, and viola da gamba (I’m guessing some of the instruments are real and some emulated) and add in synthesizers and some more modern percussion, though not a conventional drum kit. Towards the end there is the majestic sound of a pipe organ and a distorted electric guitar taking on the stately melody. As things move along, we hear harpsichord, Classical guitar, and, three tracks in, vocals. It’s here that I’m reminded of Ys, in both the tone of the voice and the way the backing parts are arranged (this is a very good thing since I really love the Ys album). There are some countermelodies featuring a talk-box electric guitar, which provides a really interesting texture in this context. Other tracks rely more heavily on synthesizers for their arrangements. All in all, it’s an enjoyable listening experience, and sounds like it could be a modern soundtrack to a travelog about French castles — which of course is exactly what it is, only without the visuals.

Now, more than 20 years later, Broguière has released A Secret World. This time out, the music embraces the 20th Century, with reasonable references being Mike Oldfield and Larry “Synergy” Fast. A few of the tracks sound almost like demo outtakes from Crises made with a drum machine; at other times it’s a bit like Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra with added guitars. “King Arthur’s March” touches a bit on the style of Châteaux, but without the medieval instrumentation. “21st Century Dancing Man” is a bit of an oddity, being an 80s synth-pop throwback song with classical sounding vocals in Latin sung by a countertenor voice. While electronic drums are prevalent on the album, they are not used to imitate real drums — the artificiality is embraced, for better or worse, and they lend a somewhat dated sound to the music which can detract from the quality of the compositions. Broguière operates fully in the harmonic era before serialism, dissonance, and atonality, a style that should be quite appealing to many listeners.

Filed under: New releases, 2000 releases, 2023 releases

Related artist(s): Patrick Broguière

More info
http://broguiere.bandcamp.com

 

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