Fievel Is Glauque drops new single “Love Weapon,” the track arrives ahead of their new album Rong Weicknes, available October 25 via Fat Possum. and originally written for Phillips’ other band Blanche Blanche Blanche with Sarah Smith. Zach Phillips on “Love Weapon”: Songs can do more than “express.” They can divine, probe, find what’s not searched for. I wrote “Love Weapon” with Sarah Smith for our band Blanche Blanche Blanche in early 2011. It’s my favorite recording on the album, and the one where the collage-editing of the live-in-triplicate recording approach sings the loudest. Blanche Blanche Blanche never really got our due, in large part because we didn’t want to. Does Fievel want to? No decision rendered, we seem to just bracket the question and keep working, building that uncertainty into the material. “How much love is enough now?”

Ma Clément on “Love Weapon”:Y If an original language — one that our bodies know and that we can all understand not intellectually but physically — exists, the lyrics of Love Weapon are written in that language. We played the song in another Fievel band 5 years ago, those recordings hidden among many others. It reappeared in summer 2023, in the same way that I recently found by lucky accident an old photograph between the pages of the book I’m reading.

Fievel Is Glauque is an international collaboration between New York-based keyboardist and bandleader Zach Phillips and Brussels-based singer and performer Ma Clément. The oRong Weicknes band is an octet lineup of musicians from the US, Belgium and Canada, featuring: Thom Gill (guitar), Logan Kane (bass), Daniel Rossi (percussion), André Sacalxot (saxophone, flute), Gaspard Sicx (drums), and Chris Weisman (guitar, electric sitar).

While the tracking sessions were infused with camaraderie and spontaneity, the post-production process proved to be challenging and lengthy. Because of its unusual tracking methodology, Phillips and the album’s recording, mixing, and mastering engineer Steve Vealey faced the task of laboriously sculpting dense mixes by subtractively editing the band’s three simultaneous layers of live performance. The result is a dynamic sound that balances intricacy with airiness, as melodies leap across the stereo field and instruments unexpectedly swell before retreating.

As for the album’s unusual name, Phillips cites the classic St. Paul adage, “when I am weak, then I am strong,” which came up in discussions with Ma as they improvised the title track one afternoon in Brussels. The quote had dogged him for some years, leading to a eureka moment: “But what if it’s the wrong weakness?” In true Fievel fashion, the fractured spelling comes directly from Clément’s lyrics notebook as she phonetically transcribed those words, her second-language skills exhausted from a gig the night before.

Fievel Is Glauque
Rong Weicknes
Tracklist
Fat Possum Records

1. Hover
2. As Above So Below
3. Would You Rather?
4. Love Weapon
5. Rong Weicknes
6. Toute Suite
7. It’s So Easy
8. I’m Scanning Things I Can’t See
9. Kayfabe
10. My Oubliette
11. Dark Dancing
12. Great Blues
13. Transparent
14. Eternal Irises
15. Haut Contre Bas

Pre-order Rong Weicknes HERE