Sebastien Tellier at the Larimer Lounge
The Lounge gets Frenched
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Mischievous French electro-pop maestro and beard-farmer Sebastien Tellier had more money onstage at the Larimer Lounge last Saturday than has likely been hauled onto that platform in the past six months combined. Rare vintage keyboards, the likes of which haven’t been seen outside of Pink Floyd reunions over the past 30 years, swarmed the tiny stage. Not to mention the giant tour bus and trailer that dwarfed the Lounge’s tiny entrance. The question was: Would this epic tease pay off during Tellier’s set? As of 9 p.m., the answer was still hours away; most of that time was spent waiting for the singer of local group Astra Moveo. But the downtime was not necessarily wasted—excellent footage of Evel Knievel’s grisliest wrecks was on the bar’s TV.
As the audience filtered into and filled the Lounge, things started to look like Fashion Week: thick specs, implied sideburns, hair combed impossibly forward and backward, scarves and bangs everywhere. The opening DJ sprinkled his indie-dance-rock set with MSTRKRFT singles and Blur remixes. Finally, Astra Moveo—described by one onlooker as “pretty palatable”—took the stage a little after 11 p.m. The entire band looked vaguely like David Cook. Their polished take on anthemic Killers-style rock, high on glitz and showmanship, was a great choice to warm the crowd’s ears before the headliner’s electro-sleaze got dumped like hot wax into it.
The science-fiction hum of ’80s synthesizers heralded Tellier's coming. Manufactured fog and Christmas lights, tended by an eager effects technician who worked his ass off the whole night, turned the usually dim and dingy Larimer stage into a lush high-school fantasia. The venue began to smell like laser tag. Tellier’s three-piece backing band fondled the pricey vintage keyboards with a detached, professional cool that deflected all the attention to Tellier himself. And the goofy French multi-instrumentalist, who chain-smoked cigarettes and slugged from a bottle of white wine perched on his piano, did not disappoint.
In addition to the silky, baritone crooning that oozed from the Frenchman throughout his set, another trait made itself clear: Tellier loves to speak gibberish. Between songs he bantered nonsensically and told wandering tales that went nowhere. Hey, at least he had his bandmembers cracking up. To help paint the full picture, below are the five most head-scratching declarations the heavily accented singer made from the stage during Saturday’s show, at times with a cigarette inexplicably sticking out of his nose:
1. “I’d like to talk about my mother. She was fat and ugly, and a shame to all the family.”
2. “In France, I am very famous because I have the huge chicken sausage business.”
3. “Jesus, please give me some power to continue the show.”
4. “I saw a little boy on the street, and he asked me, ‘Sebastien, do you want some LSD?’ And I said, ‘No, it’s the devil.’ But the boy, he was very strong. And he put it in my mouth. So now I have to come down.”
5. “I’m so glad to be in L.A. tonight.”
The true highlight of the evening, though, was Tellier’s drummer. While the other three members strutted stock dance moves and made keyboard bloops, the man on the drums swung and growled. With a sweaty pair of headphones propped on one ear, the man behind the traps led the other three members of the group through odd meters and emotional swells, riding the ride cymbals and clapping the snare drum with a focused momentum. After the dry ice dispersed and Tellier gave up center stage, most eyes in the audience swung to the drum kit and the wet-haired man behind it, nodding in time to a MacBook. As one overheard fan summed up with perfect pith: “This guy throws it down.” To keep up with Tellier, he had to.
