MONTAIGNE – IT’S HARD TO BE A FISH: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
MONTAIGNE
It’s Hard To Be A Fish (self-released)
AS EVERY TEEN FILM, coming-of-age novel, and outsider-at-school pop song will tell you, and as every one of us will confirm if we tell the truth, no one wants to be different growing up. Unique, but only to a point; an individual, as long as it’s mostly like everyone else; noticed, but not stared at. Not all of us get out of that smoothly, but if we’re lucky in adulthood we can accept at least some differentiation and maybe even eventually revel in that difference.
But not everybody gets the choice, either to be the slightly different but acceptable kid, or later to be the comfortable in their difference adult. Some people are always the fish out of water, to their community, to their family, and the price paid is ongoing.
Jess Cerro, Montaigne professionally, non-binary personally, as engaged with games on screen as games on turf, a background of multi-ethnicities in a foreground of a monoculture trying to hang on, a pop singer with an R&B strain and an even stronger artpop sensibility, a wholly independent artist now separated from a major label that didn’t really know what to do with them, an adult who has made a clear decision to separate from a family only prepared to accept the child they thought they knew, a songwriter singing the line “there is no safety with you, there is no escaping, I’m just waiting for the day I get older”, knows it’s hard to be a fish.
And knows you don’t change the water, you just choose how you swim in it, saying in the delicate yet tensile swim back (all song titles are in lowercase), “don’t know where I belong, but it’s not to you … I swim back to me, and not to you”.
The professional name, taken more than a decade ago from the French Enlightenment philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, was not an accident nor irrelevant for Cerro. If anything, It’s Hard To Be A Fish, their fourth album, is an even greater exploration and explanation of the Frenchman’s oft-quoted line that “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself. I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.”
In the organically electronic – think Laurie Anderson meeting St Vincent on very bare terms – so fast in the water, Montaigne talk/sings in slow steady strokes that keep weariness and wariness an equal distance away. Yet there is a light discomfort within it that doesn’t belie the tone, but does shadow it. There is a similar dichotomy, or is it contradiction?, in the spiky pots-and-pans clatter of talking shit, a song that invites dancing but threatens to trip you up, that pitches a reasonable counter-argument “that we are just two normal people/This ain’t a drama” to a less than ideal partner then slips in “you want to rock out with your cock out, then say you didn’t” without batting an eye.
With its dragging piano and church choir hum, best case scenario begins like a fractious interaction even as its lyrics collect optimism, but as the song fleshes out and acquires layers of sonic pretties, those lyrics switch to dispensing realism. Once again Montaigne sets the parameters, having given up trying to be accepted or acceptable for someone not willing to make that journey themselves.
I wish this album was longer, it’s 10 tracks stopping just short of 29 minutes. But as with the early Rufus Wainwright bounce of beyond the glass – vamping, a flash of country and more than a hint of 80s pop, tinkling backgrounds and sun-dipped vocals – there's a lot said in a little. It’s choppy waters, but Montaigne navigates fin-up.
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APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Montaigne – It’s Hard To Be A Fish
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Montaigne plays:
The Brightside, Brisbane, July 31
Howler, Melbourne, August 1
Mary’s Underground, Sydney, August 9