"LES FAILLES", Pomme, 2019
For my first article in our blog, I wanted something special, a theme that would set the mood of what I want to share around here...
What sounds like me ? What echoes in me ?
So I decided to talk about my last musical favourite: a voice, a heap of sonorities, the sweetness of a set of poetries I deeply feel inside like a telepatic spell : "Les failles", the latest Pomme's album, came out on the 1rst of November 2019.
The second album of Claire Pommet is, musically talking, a graceful mix of folk sonorities, electro arrangement and simple melodies. This simplicity is revealing of the topic she decided to put under her quill: fragilities, death, anxiety, depression, diseases... So many "dark" themes, "hard" themes that suddenly appear as a sweat and melancholic dream. From all of the instruments you can hear in the album: synthetizer, accoustic and electric guitars, piano, one and unique sound stays the essential ingredient to that alchemy: Pomme's voice is used in all of its possibilities, as an organic synthetiser itself. Smooth, sweet, sharpened, old school intonations allow, with a particularlly bittersweet handwritting, a powerfull bewitchment.
"Les sorcières"
Talking about Bewitchement...
"Les sorcières", is the 10th track of the entended album "Les failles cachées".
As its french title can suggest: Pomme (here co-singing with Klô Pelgag) uses the symbol of witches as an anthem to feminism.
Yes, in "Les sorcières", most of modern women seem to have as many magic-powers as inquisitors after them:
The ones who wear what they want
Who believe what they want
Do what they want,
Have sex when and with the person they want
Decide to have childs or not.
The ones who cherish their indipendance
The one who see people, things, nature as a special thing, a new world... A long list of some of the biggest fights women themself won accross the years.
An anthem to feminism we said, being as political as covered with the largest kindness, and at which the two voices of the singers give a fairy-tale atmosphere.
A story of witches...and feminism
Since feminism exists, the witch is one of its symbol
Became famous in the sadly not less known "witch hunt", which took place in the Renaissance around the 15th to the 17th century, witches have always been the subject of persecutions. Those persecutions could vary from torture to the stake itself. In Europe, 60 000 to 100 000 death penalties have been sentenced and 80% of those convictions concerned women.
But what (the hell) did those women to deserve such a treatment ? Many things are to take into account:
In a society where mortality and child mortality is high, where farmings may have an hasardous succes, and dominated by a strict catholicism: inquisitors and farmers need a scapegoat and denunciation was going strong. If jews were an easy target, women were as well ! The "Malleus maleficarum": the most known tract about withcraft, explains how women are weaks and paticularly fated to the demonic tendencies. The women concerned ? Single ones, old ones, widows, women who decided not to have a child or who used...particular cures. By the condamnation of women who didn't fit with the church vision: chastity, purity, docility...witches became, from the 19th century to our days, a symbol to the feminists:
In 1968, on Halloween's day, several women, dressed up with black capes parade in Wall street: the W.I.T.C.H (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), revendicates equality and writes a manifesto.
In 2019, the journalist Mona Chollet publishes "Sorcières, la puissance invaincue des femmes".
Extract from the W.I.T.C.H Manifesto, 1968
Read it all, It's worth it ! ;)