Depicting a year in its 13 tracks, Joey Robin Haché’s newest album, Trente, provides listeners with a collection of auditory commentaries on some of life’s less-beautiful moments and realities. It aims to sidestep norms and expectations while taking listeners on a journey through a compilation of thoughts and emotions Haché experienced over the span of its making: his 31st year.
Upon first listen, the album’s most noticeable feature is its lack of consistent genre. This could be easily attributable to the fact that the emotions being portrayed throughout the release do not all fall perfectly in line with each other, either. Each new feeling expressed comes with a unique sound to suit it. However, the meaning behind this genre jumping does go a little bit deeper than that.
“With Trente,” says Haché, “I decided that I no longer wanted to identify with only one music genre; I wanted to explore various styles of music: folk, pop, rock, punk, gypsy, ambient, metal, blues, country, experimental, and more.”
And the tracks truly do touch on all of those genres. “Montmorency” dives deep into the sounds of gypsy jazz and utilizes layers of crazed laughter overtop of lyrics that speak of deep depression, while “Beau temps pour l’apocalypse” uses country-folk sounds to express a metaphorical apocalypse that arrises from a war within oneself.
“Nowadays, everyone is trying to identify an artist, without even comprehending the full concept of the album. Every song [on Trente] has its genre, matched to a specific subject, and that’s what really jives with me. I got bored trying to fit in, so that’s why I got the f*ck out of the canvas.”
Haché says he is producing music this way in the name of anti-branding and anti-pop. He is protesting norms by embracing counterculture.
“I want to denounce the popular music industry for putting artists in boxes, and for making us into identifiable, safe, easy to sell and manipulate products. What I try to do with Trente is to defy those conventions and propose a different method for producing an album in 2019.”
The release’s most pop-like track and first radio single, “Game Over,” openly discounts the concept of placing musicians into uniform boxes to suit the norms of music production and popular music. Its lyrics are written from the perspective of an amateur musician who lacks any of the knowledge and skill necessary to actually create music and just does exactly what their producer is telling them to.
The majority of the remaining tracks — with the most glaring exceptions being the softer, more ambient sounding “Alright” and “Bulldozer” — take on a heavier sound, leaning towards rock ‘n’ roll and blues.
But Haché’s raspy voice acts as a unifying element throughout, allowing the songs to all still sound like they belong together.
The first half of the album is mainly where the countercultural, anarchist themes surface, and the second half is where Haché really digs into the personal experiences he has endured.
“I was diagnosed with a rare allergic condition called eosinophilic esophagitis, which is the constant swelling of the esophagus caused by an allergen. It was so bad at one point that I couldn’t swallow anything solid for a period of two months, which impacted severely on my mental state.
“Mix it up with constant panic attacks, full-on anxiety problems and nervous depression, borderline bipolar episodes, and you get all the subjects discussed in the second half of Trente.”
Another notable feature of Trente is the jarring artwork that goes along with it. Its cover depicts Haché himself in a rough-and-tumble, beaten-and-bloody state. With patchy, blood-stained hair on his head and face along with a black eye, Haché stares through the camera and straight into your soul with a look that tells of those hard times that have marked him. The idea behind it is to represent, visually, the feelings and ailments that are within us and often go unseen.
In Trente, Joey Robin Haché gets unrelentingly real and honest. He discusses hard emotions and mental states, proves he can write music in whatever genre he feels like and even provides us with an additional visual punch. The language used in the album is metaphorical and creative, and the production quality does not disappoint.
You can catch Joey Robin Haché at one of his two upcoming album release parties, for which the dates are listed below.
Dates:
11.27.2019 – Moncton, NB @ Aberdeen Cultural Centre
11.28.2019 – Bathurst, NB @ La Bibitte