Satine -- Ünder Philharmonëën

7/10

Behold, one of, if not the most obscure album in my collection, from a band I'm not sure even exists, recorded in a setting I don't understand. In late 2008, I loved to put La Blogothèque's "Take Away" shows on my second monitor at work, and just let the music play. Perusing the website now, and seeing they are featuring the likes of Justin Timberlake and Alicia Keys, it seems they have become not just a bit, but extremely more mainstream. That's just an observation, not a diss. Anyway, one afternoon, when I was working late and everyone else had gone home, this enrapturing video popped up.

The singer looked and sounded like some young, French Björk, and I was immediately sold. It helped that my wife and I had been enjoying a lot of European films that year, and also were living in an ancient, mid-city apartment, and that the sunset rooftop Parisian setting of the Take Away video seemed particularly familiar and inviting.
Strangely enough, this Take Away show is some of the only remaining proof that this band, Satine, existed. I found their website and a couple of French social media websites of theirs, which advertised that they were about to record a show with an orchestra, which seemed strange considering they didn't seem to have any recorded music to their name outside of some obscure little EP. Don't you get established, then play with an orchestra? Maybe they were established in France, and just not in the U.S.? But then, where was the French presence? Their French social media sites didn't exactly present a flurry of fan activity. I was so confused. Then, their website vanished. It was like they never existed. And like everyone does with something that never existed, I immediately forgot about them. At some point in August of 2011, a thought entered my head.
Satine.
What is Satine?
Oh, yeah, that possibly French band (I am assuming they are from France) who put on that cool rooftop performance, and who was supposed to release that live orchestral album. I searched online. Strangely enough, the orchestral album had been self-released by the band at some point in 2010... and it was on sale in the Microsoft Zune store.
Guess what.
Of course I had a Zune.
I immediately downloaded the album. I took my Zune with me a couple days later on a Penske truck trek from Baton Rouge to Minneapolis to help my brother move. I listened to the album, along with The Weeknd's just-released mixtape, Thursday, back when The Weeknd released mixtapes and I liked his music, on the empty floor in my brother and sister-in-law's new guest room, which is where I slept the two nights I was in Minneapolis. The second night was the one LSU trounced Oregon in the college football season kickoff, in the season they should have won their fourth national championship.
A couple months later, my Zune broke. It was the second Zune I owned, and both of them broke in less than a year. The Zune sucked. Naturally, when I visited the Zune store to make sure I could access all the music I purchased, Satine was gone, and now the Zune store no longer even exists. And yet, there is proof that Satine, whoever they were, existed.
The Take Away Shows are still on La Blogothèque. The album is miraculously available on Amazon, though it has no reviews. The mysterious "Topic" user on Youtube, I believe a bot which collects and posts published music, posted the album for listening. I just found it yesterday, February 28th, 2018, and I was the first listener.
Who the hell was Satine? Some kids who scraped enough time to write ten songs, and enough money to hire an orchestra to record a live album with them? An underground Parisian band with similarly underground fans? What happened to them after the live album, Ünder Philharmonëën, was released?
Why did they suddenly vanish? Did they die in a plane crash? Decide that recording a live album with an orchestra was their only aspiration, and that they had to immediately disband with this one album to their name? And what about their website before it completely vanished? I visited it once when it appeared to be deconstructing. With a little...searching on its pages, I found raw MP3 files of the ten Ünder Philharmonëën songs. The applause one can hear on the album versions does appear, proving that someone was their to watch these songs be recorded, but it happens at different times than the album versions.
Is this all some experiment to screw with my head?
Well, it's working. The thing is, Ünder Philharmonëën is, maddeningly, almost great. The band at its is core is some strange melding of violining street busking, back alley club rocking, and what the critics call "post-rock," meaning there are often slow builds to big crescendos featuring drum rolls and rapidly strummed electric guitars. Opening track, "Unphoneed" is a great example of all of these factors, culminating in a beautiful, strangely vulnerable, yet optimistic crescendo.
However, if Ünder Philharmonëën's got an issue, that issue raises its head over the next few tracks. I don't know why I worded that sentence that way. How about, "However, Ünder Philharmonëën has an issue:..." Anyway, this issue is that the building portions of some of the songs get just a little old and boring, and the songs that do this are stacked in the album's first half. They are all 5-7 minutes long. Thankfully, an unexpected guitar burst four minutes into track five, "Epothèque," puts an end to this, and the rest of the album moves forward with good momentum, the band playing off the orchestra with a nice tension.
I really feel like a few more years' experience would have trimmed off some of Satine's musical fat. They could have released a truly stunning second album. Instead I'm left not even sure if they were ever actually real.


2010 Self-released
1. Unphoneed 7:12
2. Iron Güm 5:25
3. 2090 7:57
4. In Vidrio 5:02
5. Epothèque 7:20
6. Sadteen 5:45
7. Messsnow 5:31
8. Today Sister 5:10
9. Trouble Rouble 7:58
10. October Dane 6:41