Cocosuma

Third time lucky?

Paris 

01/02/2008 - 

Back in 2004, there was a huge buzz around Cocosuma, a nifty pop trio who recorded the theme tune to the French TV series Clara Sheller and appeared on a number of cutting-edge compilations. An American radio station had just picked up on the trio when wham! bam! their singer walked out. Two years later, after losing another frontwoman, Chab and Michel finally hooked up with Amanda. And the happy threesome are now back in the spotlight with We’ll Drive Home Backwards, an album of slinky, sinuous pop tunes.

Imagine the scene. The sun is shining, birds are singing, there’s not a cloud in the sky - and Cocosuma’s second album, Reindeer Show the Way has just hit record stores. The first single release, The Servant, catches on like wildfire and it looks like Cocosuma are about to hit the big time. Then, two months later, singer Kacey announces she is quitting the band and returning to Sweden. This delivers a knockout blow to Kacey’s musician partners, Chab and Michel, who find themselves singer-less just as they need to present the songs from their second album live on stage. Depressed but not utterly defeated, Cocosuma go on to release the elegiac We Were a Trio. The album, featuring the last songs Chab and Michel recorded with Kacey before her departure, are infused with a note of melancholy and finality.

But then a miracle blows in from across the Channel in the form of singer Amanda. Dressed in a green cardigan, flowery brown shirt, with a string of blue plastic pearls at her neck, Amanda looks like the sort of sweet English girl who would insist on taking her empty coffee cup back to the bar to save the waiter’s legs. Amanda is also a firm believer in premonitions. "A few years ago," she says, "I dreamt I was performing with this band in this foreign city – a city like Paris. And that’s pretty weird because that’s exactly what I’m doing with my life right now!"

Meanwhile, Chab and Michel were not exactly in the mood to believe in dreams coming true. The two musicians were working on other projects and gradually laying Cocosuma to rest. The pair had already lost another singer before Kacey walked out on them and it seemed like the curse was not about to lift any time soon. "It’s like in the film Spinal Tap," Michel laughs, "where the drummer dies at every gig! When we recorded the first album, we had this series of demos and we decided what we needed was some female vocals over the top. Anyway, we hooked up with a singer called Jenny and made the album more or less like that. Then, with the second album, we decided we really wanted to function as a group and not have some singer grafted on at the end. Things went really well with Kacey, our Swedish singer – until the day she flipped out and had some sort of post-adolescent crisis. I don’t think we were to blame. We’re basically a pair of nice well brought-up guys. I guess losing singers is just one of those risks you have to deal with in life."

Somewhere between Joy Division - and Take That!

While Chab and Michel were still licking their wounds, Amanda moved to Paris in 2006. She had already had some musical experience, working with Dhani Harrison and the drum’n’bass producer Klute in the U.K., and shortly after moving to the French capital a friend introduced her to Chab and Michel. The three hit if off immediately. "We’d actually met a lot of people before Amanda," says Michel, "We weren’t trying to find a singer just for the sake of having a singer, you know! What I love about working as part of a trio is that it makes the creative process a triangular affair. You end up with something that goes beyond the individual talents involved. It was getting to the point where me and Chab were getting to be a bit of an old couple. So it was good that Amanda came along when she did and shook things up. This is still Cocosuma - but Cocosuma with a new twist!"

Cocosuma’s new album, We’ll Drive Home Backwards, is "more pop, less electro" than the band’s previous work, but it still revolves around their signature mix of ‘60s pop influences and contemporary sounds. And Amanda’s whimsical vocals meld perfectly with Chab and Michel’s slinky melodies. The first single release, Charlotte’s on Fire, does not have a typical punchy chorus line, but it seems to linger in the back of your mind nevertheless. And you’ll be amazed how quickly Twilight Zone and Suffragettes end up there, too. Musically speaking, Cocosuma claim they fall somewhere "between Joy Division and British boys’ band Take That", but there’s a strong flavour of ‘90s trip-hop on the Sneaker Pimps-style Cinders - and even a hint of The Beatles on Oh Ruby Sun.

Getting experimental in the studio

Cocosuma’s new sound owes much to Amanda, whose sudden arrival shook up Chab and Michel’s usual working methods. "We decided to approach things totally differently this time round," Michel admits, "We actually recorded the first album in my bedroom - and as neither of us could play trumpet or drums we had to be a bit sneaky and work in a lot of samples. This time round, we worked in a real studio, four of us, including a drummer. And we tried to get the maximum number of effects right there in the studio. On ‘Charlotte’s on Fire’, for instance, you’ll hear this weird thing going on with drums. We hadn’t planned that before going into the studio. It was something the sound engineer came up with on the spot. So the song ended up going in a totally new direction, sort of ‘80s new wave. It was interesting to work differently this time round. Before, we used to piece our albums together brick by brick."

Interestingly enough, the release of Cocosuma’s new album, We’ll Drive Home Backwards, was preceded by a 7-inch single featuring two very different remixes of Charlotte’s on Fire - one by Marc Colin (of Nouvelle Vague fame), the other a more blatantly electro reworking by Bot’Ox (a duo which includes crazy, off-the-wall dance music producer Cosmo Vitelli). The 7-inch also includes a wonderful atmospheric reworking of Cinders by Origami Birö. These were official remixes commissioned by Cocosuma, but Michel is not ruling out the idea of someone coming along and doing an unofficial remix in the future. "The way we see it is you record your song, then you put it out there and anything can happen. It’s out of your control. Once you’ve released a song it doesn’t belong to you any more. I think the concept of copyright is important, but at the same time a song’s not a material object. Anyone can come along and do anything they want with it!"

Cocosuma We'll Drive Home Backwards (Third Side Records) 2008

Ludovic  Basque

Translation : Julie  Street