Eloi sets the Botanique on fire

“Ça brule ici”, Eloi remarked delicately when she had once again set the Chapiteau tent in the Brussels herb garden on fire with a bomb of hyperpop. Éloïse Leau, as her full name is, is bringing a breath of fresh air to the French pop scene. Her songs are a highly flammable brew of punk, rave, new wave and pop, with screeching synths, screeching rock guitars and lots and lots of autotune. Some hear Grimes in it, others The Cure.

In Brussels, Eloi was keen to show her punky persona. The Frenchwoman had undergone a transformation, something between punky tomboy, dominatrix and Betty Boop, with especially cool boots. The singer was flanked by a drummer whose pink haircut he had ordered from Kurt Cobain’s hairdresser and a guitarist in a tight tie. Synth and bass were on tape, which was a bit sad for a genre that relies at least half on electronics.

The guitars and drums were more dominant than in the studio versions of Eloi’s songs. ‘Sans cesse’ and ‘Call me’, driven by a rudimentary rhythm track, for which Eloi himself also strapped on the guitar, panted like dark post-punk, but at double speed.

When the middle fingers went up in the raw ‘Pyromane’, the trio looked like a hyper version of Nirvana. “Ces enculés peuvent se la fermer,” Eloi sang with a low, masculine distorted voice and one leg on the monitor. Loosely translated: “Those bastards can shut their mouths.” The drummer hesitated between heavy sledgehammer blows and hyperkinetic drum and bass.

Halfway through the set, Eloi even challenged her guitarist to one “guitar challenge”. It was not a duel to the death, but Eloi had made her point. ‘Novembre éternel’ with its synthetic bass beckoned to trashy Eurohouse, but there too the guitars became dominant. Especially when the guitarist lay on her back and Eloi draped herself suggestively over it.

During ‘Orion’ the glacial synths seized power. And in ‘Jtm de ouf’ they were allowed to go all out, with a thumping techno beat in the back. The song, a new interpretation of ‘Je t’aime de ouf’ by the French pop singer Wejdene Chaïb, turned the tent into a frenzied karaoke bar.

On her debut released at the end of last year Dernier orage Eloi sings how everything is on fire. She sees great metaphors in natural elements to translate the intense feelings she felt as an adolescent into songs.

This is how ‘Volcan’ completely lived up to its title. Eloi sang how she didn’t want to make war on anyone, how she thought “Toi seulement pour t’oublier”, and that she wanted to run for her life. Everything about her songs goes against it “deux cents kilometers heures”as she herself put it in the song of the same name.

With the dramatic ‘Soleil mort’, Eloi ended her set as fervently as it started. The mosh pit bobbed up and down to the fast, punky electronics, completely in a trance. Is Eloi the future of French pop, as some media say? That remains to be seen. But ça brulethat’s for sure.