The Blaze - Territory EP

Pitchfork 58

The Blaze’s debut single, “Virile,” originally appeared on the Bromance label’s Homieland Vol. 2 compilation last year, but if you have come across the French duo’s work, there’s a good chance that it has been in their capacity as filmmakers. The video for “Virile” has logged 1.4 million views in the space of just over a year; their second, “Territory,” has racked up 1.6 million plays in just the past month, and along the way they have earned accolades from Romain Gavras, who directed M.I.A.’s “Born Free” video, and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, who called their “Territory” clip “THE best piece of art I’ve seen in 2017.”

Both videos, which the artists directed themselves, are visually and conceptually provocative. “Virile” features two men listening to music late into the night in a bare-bones apartment in an urban tower block. They are presumably of North African descent (an impression reinforced by the Arabic titles at the beginning of the clip). Over the course of the video, they smoke spliffs, spar, and—possibly under the influence of MDMA—exhibit a tenderness that’s rare to see between two men on screen, including a will-they-or-won’t-they moment leading up to the edge of a kiss. “Territory” is more straightforward: Here, an emigré returns home to Algiers, where he is tearfully reunited with his family. Like “Virile,” it is a meditative mood piece sumptuously arrayed in shadows and slow motion, and it climaxes with a daybreak dance party on a rooftop overlooking the Mediterranean. In both, music—specifically, the duo’s slow, mournful take on house—serves as the vehicle for the most profound kind of catharsis.

Aside from the videos’ warm portrayal of Arab masculinity, a topic rarely broached in Western media, what is notable about both is what goes unanswered. Are the men in “Virile” lovers, straight men swept up in the moment, or something else? What is the link between tenderness and aggression? Unfortunately, presented without visuals, the Blaze’s music doesn’t display the same degree of nuance. All four songs on their debut EP—“Territory,” “Virile,” and two new tracks, plus two interludes—are cut from the same cloth, with minor-key pianos pooling tearfully around crisp machine rhythms. They represent perfectly capable takes on the style sometimes called UK bass, but they rarely soar in the way that the music so clearly wants to. The perfunctory boom-tick rhythms drag, even with an added push from syncopated 808 toms; the four-bar chord changes feel pat, and the details—a plucked kalimba in “Sparks & Ashes,” a percussive synth counterpoint in “Territory”—aren’t enough to break gravity’s spell. The lone exception is “Virile,” in which rising and falling synthesizers contribute to a state of tension that’s genuinely moving.

The main sticking point is the vocals. It’s not so much that English isn’t the duo’s strong suit; they get the basic ideas across just fine, despite the occasional clunker (“They light me up your flying clouds/They ever get me high like a cool blunt smoke”). But, whether compensating for their accents or their untutored voices, they’ve aggressively pitched down the vocals on all four tracks, rendering dancehall-inspired cadences thick and gelatinous. Processed vocals are par for the course in this strain of bassy house music, but they simply don’t work here. Instead of coming off as druggy and suggestive, they sound mannered, lugubrious, gloopy. The backing tracks might have held up better with a stronger vocal performance; instead, both beats and vocals feel like scratch tracks in search of a final take. The good news is that, once you’ve seen the videos, the visuals are so strong that the music is likely to function mainly to trigger memories of the visuals. Club tracks like these are a dime a dozen, but the vision the Blaze display is far more rare; whatever they do next, you can bet that it will be worth watching.