Stoner HiVe got the chance recently to sit down with singer/guitarist Olivier and drummer Quentin, two of the three members of The Lance Vance Vengeance from Paris, France. A Zoom chat was fired up from across the pond to dig into their fantastic new LP “Broglie”, a mix of grunge, stoner, doom, and more, and we ended up going far beyond Zoom’s measly initial 40 minutes. We’ll spare you our collective and lengthy fanboying over King Gizzard’s double drumming and Rage Against The Machine, but after comparing notes on the COVID crisis in the US and France, we got to the meat of it. Dig in!
Stoner HiVe: How did The Lance Vance Vengeance start?
Olivier: Quentin was coming back from his studies abroad, and we moved to a home studio, located in a warehouse and played there 24/7.
Quentin: We got loads of amps and thought: we’re gonna crank this shit to fucking 10! Drinking twenty beers, and just play blues and punk. But at some point we were blocked, we needed someone else to bring more sound and melody.
Olivier: I sing and play the guitar live, so I was fucked up in my brain. I find it pretty hard doing all of that. You know, the pedals, the music, the singing, I’m not gonna make it. But the trio was later. We recorded our first EP DIY, in the home studio, over a year, just the two of us.
SH: So, what was the biggest difference recording Broglie?
O: We didn’t record it live like the EP, but with our friend Antoine, a sound engineer, at studio Vimondière.
Q: We had a schedule for the first time, 7 days to record 8 tracks.
O: We called the LP “Broglie”, the name of the city where it was recorded, because it’s really about that time in that studio. We recorded a lot of different instruments. For the song “Fog”, we have hand drums, Quentin plays a solo. It’s more of us being a studio band, not live. But for this summer, we have new songs for something more live, more punchy and more us.
SH: The record sounds super clean, and when you need to crank out the fuzz, that really hits, too. What drink and food were you living off?
Q: Haha, rum! Lots of rum. In France we have Rum Arrangè, it’s like pure rum with fruits. We actually have photographs of all the booze we drank for a week! A lot of wine too, c’mon we’re French, red wine. I’m gonna let Olivier tell about the food, cause it was complicated, haha.
O: Yeah it was funny, I had just turned vegetarian! We were stewing soups, doing heavy rock music and drinking rum!
SH: So, what was the most euphoric or exciting moment for you about the new album?
O: For me, it’s when Andre brought the cello into the studio for the song “Hooked”. Most of the songs were written for the bass guitar with six strings. For “Hooked” I wrote the guitar parts and Quentin wrote the lyrics. Andre’s cello adds a dark Alice In Chains feeling, I think it sounds marvelous.
Q: To me, it was when Olivier started to sing… Olivier was never really at ease with his own voice and singing *Olivier shakes head*. We had a difficult time with vocals, from the start. I always told Olivier “you gotta sing, I can’t sing”. It took two and a half years, and in the studio was the first time that I saw Olivier like almost at ease with the singing thing. We went to a café to not disturb him, and we came back with some berries and shit like that, and I remember vividly I came in and was like... “Shit! What is he doing right now?” I mean, the voice, really! I’m not fucking around with Olivier; it was like another person singing. I never, never, never heard Olivier sing like this before. That fucking guy! Just sang and sang and sang at home on his own, I don’t know, in the car. He didn’t tell me that he was working on his voice, he just did it! It was really something to hear him singing like this.
O: Yeah I think I’m not a natural born singer, I don’t have a really good voice. I just have the ear, so I know if I’m wrong or right, but I don’t really like my voice that much. Recording our first EP really helped me, because it was the first time I could focus on singing. It was the same in the studio. I think when you came back I just recorded “J.L.S”, which is a really heavy song, and I just spit my guts out on it. And it’s cool.
Q: The second take, I remember Andre told you “Just go with it, dude! Do your shit and we’ll see you after”, and it worked. I have tapes from the first rehearsal three years ago. Hearing those three years and the way he now sings, it’s really nice.
SH: I love how you transition on Océan and a few songs, from the clean, almost delicate guitar, and then the punch comes in. An awesome dynamic.
O: To Antoine, the sound engineer, I was like, “Turn it down”. He was like “No, no, no”. “Turn the clean guitar down, turn it down!” We get that punch in your face when it hits you.
SH: Boom! And “Fog” was a little more subdued, and then you brought the heavy in.
O: Yeah, “Fog” is where we wanted a new wave sound. There’s not really a bass because I’m playing through a guitar amp, like The Cure. We want to focus on the vocal harmonies more, me and Andre.
Q: And the funny thing with “Fog”, it was the intro of our live shows. But the first time we played it, we realized that the people were really in the zone and the “Fog” atmosphere. We said to ourselves, “Nah, that’s not an intro, that’s a song!”
O: We conceived “Broglie” as a two-sided vinyl. There’s a progression from mellow to heavy, and the opening tracks of each side had to be “Hooked” and “Océan”. “Once More” is kind of a power ballad. And we wanted to finish with “Doom”, heavy Black Sabbath. If a metalhead listens to the album, he would listen to the first two tracks and say, “Fuck this, these guys do pop music”. But if you play the whole album, it’s like ok, they’re heavy…
SH: Speaking of playing live, what are you looking forward to most when you finally get to play live again?
O: We decided in January: we’re going to playing two guitars and no bass. Andre and I are both guitarists, and we’re just sticking to one setup. If you play a song and stop, it’s different than if you can hold the stage for 25 minutes.
Q: When we go see King Gizzard, Idles, Fu Manchu, they never stop playing! And I want the live energy again. When you go out to concerts in Paris, you always meet new people and get drunk with them, that’s what I’m looking forward to. And to live my life! I miss my life. Getting back to playing gigs, that’s our life.
SH: Well, hey, before we wrap it up, is there anything you guys want to put out there for folks to know?
Q: We feel grateful to have our music out there. It’s the first time our music traveled. I mean, you’re from the US. To us, that’s, like, fucking crazy. We’ve listened to US music since we were kids! We just sent 5 vinyl records to the US last week, and to Germany, and to us that’s mind-blowing. And we are talking with you right now. We feel grateful that our music is speaking to people all over the world, that people are listening to our music. That’s all we want.
(Written by Shasta Beast)
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