Well no, I did not lose a bet. I was not threatened or blackmailed in any way and chose freely. Although I have often, if not almost awlays, been disinclined to write about French punk bands, not just because French music generally irritates me and puts me in a foul and querulous mood, but because I did not grow up listening to French bands and in fact only witness their talent, or lack thereof, when at gigs. Many exceptions to this bitter rule exist, thankfully, but French hardcore bands too often wallow in that US hardcore style that I found particularly cumbersome and tainted with testosterone and basically undeserving of my august attention. Hence something of a reluctance.
Places like Saint-Etienne or Bordeaux have proved, year in year out, to be able to deliver quality and tasteful hardcore punk music enabling the average French punk to look a Swede in the eye and claim, albeit with a shaky voice and with a horrendous accent: "we have a couple of decent bands at home you know". One cannot overstate how prevalent an influence the Bordeaux hardcore scene has had for the past 20 years. It is known for its deep-rooted passion for the D and for the recognized quality of its bands well outside the country. The fact that it's pretty much the same 10 people doing all the bands is of no importance as you could say the same thing about many a good scene in 2024. In the war against shit taste, they stand as a bastion of good hardcore music and the national résistance against the lurking peril of French oi. They protest to survive, resist to exist and ain't no feeble bastards when it comes to reject the rules of boots'n'braces and £75 Fred Perry shirts.
If you are into d-beat, and I concur that you are if you are reading this (unless you just enjoy reading pompous bollocks), you will have heard of class Bordeaux bands like Gasmask Terrör or Bombardement but the town also has hidden nuggets such as Fosse Commune (which translates as "mass grave", cheery stuff) that the common Discharge worshipper might be unaware of and it is my job, as the condescending redactor-in-chief and self-appointed leader of good taste, to educate the masses and uncover little-known but valuable d-beat bands and in actual fact I rate Fosse Commune pretty highly when it comes to that zoological classification.
The band proved to be, sadly, short-lived so that you would be partly pardoned from not knowing them and I admit that my proximity with the Bordeaux clique did facilitate my coming across them. Fosse Commune was born out of the desire of guitar hero Jesse and drummer Rémi to start a band that would sound like Disaster playing on Disclose's gears which on paper sounds like a very just cause to play music. The masterminds behind this evil plan were not exactly beginners as Jesse had been previously dicking around in the rudimentary albeit noisy Incendiaire and Slakteri and was also singing in the very fun Sexplosion (the title of a Discharge song you wish you could forget) at that point in time, while Rémi was, and still is, involved on the bass with the much underrated raw and furious hardcore band Hondartzako Hondakinak (amply referred to "Honda Honda" because we are, beside being Street Fighter 2 fans, linguistically lazy and unschooled in the Basque language). Singer Esmé and bass player Jean-Marc (formerly in Déjà Mort) joined the troop and they joyfully recorded this 7 song demo, with lyrics in English but for "Des chiens", in 2017 which they self-released in true DIY fashion and therefore had to distribute themselves which must have been a pain in the arse.
Although not getting any discount on the tape myself, Fosse Commune were a generous band with about 14 minutes of noisy d-beat to gift the world. Had they been American, they would have released it on Lp and embarked on a two week European tour with five different shirt designs. The idea was basic and simple enough, nothing revolutionary was undertaken and Fosse Commune, in the grand Distory, could be characterized as pleasingly unoriginal and tastefully unimaginative. From a national perspective however, the creative intent that drove the band was precisely the opposite. Indeed, playing Disaster-styled d-beat hardcore with a Disclose-styled guitar sound in the landscape of French punk music sounds like a near-impossibility, a conceptual aberration, something that can barely be imagined. What would Les Béruriers Noirs think? So while Fosse Commune would have been a delicious non-event in South-East Asia, Spain or the States - albeit one that I would undeniably celebrate - its national uniqueness cannot be understated, as obscure and brief the band might have been.
Guitar hero Jesse confessed that the project was to use the songwriting of Disaster and apply a layer of Kawakami. This adventurous endeavour had already been touched upon by Deadlock from Japan, who similarly relied heavily on Disaster's slower d-beat drumming - what I call "jogging d-beat" - but don't know that Fosse Commune really thought about them in the writing process. Simple, heavy and distorted riffs the sound of which required about 15 pedals (it probably would have been easier to just plug the guitar into a rusty tumble dryer), some "just like Disaster" transitions and overall a well-executed primitive d-beat pace with a solid sound that fits what they were trying to do and their devotion to the subgenre's tenets. The band's originality - a rarefied realm in this genre - cannot be said to be immeasurable but does exist with Esmé's direct and raspy vocals whose flow and texture are reminiscent of 90's crusty anarchopunk (Lost World or Fleas and Lice at times?) rather than d-beat strictness. As mentioned earlier in the series with Atentado's Ep, female vocalists are few and far between in the cult of Discharge replicas so that it always sounds like a breath of suffocating yet fresh air.
This is a humble but solid demo tape that will undeniably ravish d-beat raw punk sectarians and repel wankers who equate hardcore music with wannabe New York bodybuilders but I believe that Fosse Commune, for its simplicity and groove, can also be enjoyed by the casual hardcore punk fan. I wish the band were able to record an Ep but it was not to be. The one minor flaw of the tape might be the artwork - which I can enjoy - as it is unclear to me what the band wanted to achieve with the lack of references to their extremely referential sound. But maybe I'm just a bit think, innit?
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