Messed!Up
Take the best songs off Daft Punk’s epic album Random Access Memory and add even more funk plus an overdose of spacepop and you get French six-piece L’imperatrice. The nu-disco/spacepop band have caused a stir after the pandemic, and after an epic Coachella show in 2022, they’ve played full houses wherever they pop up. And they put on a show indeed! It’s coordinated outfits completed with lit-up beating hearts attached to their shirts to creatively choreographed dances. Even if you’re not into their kind of nu-disco pop music, there’s no way you won’t enjoy their show – it’s colorful and it’s groovy. Just have a look at how they dress and you know they have swagger and grooves in spades! That’s the treat we were in for at a sold-out Grosse Freiheit 36.
The band went through a huge transformation recently when their long-time vocalist Flore Benguigui left the band to take care of her physical and mental health (read her announcement), and much was on stake as Flore has been an amazing performer on stage and one of major reasons the band has grown a fanbase, but tonight we learned that her replacement, Louve, picked up the torch where Flore left it and insured us it won’t be any different with her in the band.
Just like at their Way Out West Festival gig in Gothenburg a few months ago, they opened up with the instrumental song ‘Cosmogonie’ from their latest album Pulsar while the band members walked onto the stage and started working on their gear. Just before the Daft Punky song ‘Amour Ex Machina’ starts, Louve appears on stage to the roar of the crowd. From this point, it was down the groovy lane to the rhythms of funky melodies and nu-disco basslines.
Within the next twenty minutes some of the best songs off Pulsar follow when they play ‘Me Da Igual’, ‘Girl!’, and ‘Danza Marilù’ which all share a heavy disco backbeat and synthesizer rhythms, and introduce the band’s infectious danceability as well as Louve (a band member introduced her to the crowd). And on top of it all, they sprinkle it with the type of spacepop sounds you’ll hear on any of Jean-Michel Jarre’s 1970s album. It’s hard to just stand there and watch the spectacle. Normally, the Hamburg crowd can be a bit stiff upper lip, standing with their arms crossed, but tonight that was all gone – it’s a contagious energy that’s impossible to ignore. The point is that we didn’t really expect L’imperatrice to cause such a stir in Hamburg on a Sunday night but it was sold out and people wanted to dance – and dance they did.
The composition on stage is an eye-catcher with the band organized in two sides working back to back with the drummer in the middle at the back of the stage. It’s just as organized as the moves are choreographed – a sextet of badass musicians who clearly love what they do and know how to create a vibe.
About the Daft Punk vibes; they also play a Daft Punk cover, ’Aerodynamic’, to follow in the French tradition before they delve into old classics like ‘Agitations Tropicales’ and ‘Submarine’ before they leave the stage and return just a minute later for an encore, highlighting two my favorites, ‘Erreur 404’ and ‘Vanille Fraise’. That was it, there was no energy left and my left hamstring told me it was time to find someone who could help me get to the u-bahn.
It’s hard not to compare L’imperatrice to Daft Punk, Polo & Pan, and Kavinsky, at least music-wise with beats and melodies following a tradition that today is labeled French electropop. But what makes L’imperatrice stick out is their performance and their overall show. It’s sort of a Barbie world of lights and colors and gives you a surreal feeling of being on another planet or in some kind of dream. And we need them! While Daft Punk is on hiatus (or have they called it a day – who knows!?) we need French nu-disco and no one does it better at the moment than L’imperatrice.
Hopefully, they return sooner rather than later, and with some new tunes in tow!
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Photos: Julia Schwendner
