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Jean-Eric dance portrait

Not so Jean-Eric

written by: on December 10, 2010

“Some people think L.A. is a place for the brain-dead. They say if you turned off the sprinklers, it would turn into a desert. But I think … I don’t know, it’s not what I expected. It’s a place where they’ve taken a desert and turned it into their dreams. It’s also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is looking to the outside for verification that what they’re doing is all right.”
– L.A. Story

Something about Jean-Eric dredged that line from my memory. It might have been the band’s name, a double-secret inside-joke that led to a fruitless search for “Generic” on the web. Or maybe it’s the way the band, full of wild ideas and boundless energy, exemplifies the movement to take a onetime desert (my hometown of New Orleans, after the hundred-year flood)  and turn it into Jean-Eric’s dreams.

Jean-Eric, like New Orleans, isn’t looking to the outside world for verification, approval or much of anything else. It’s a different “LA” story. This is Louisiana, which has no City of Angels, but seemingly has the same basic elements.

Jean-Eric is not just a NOLA band though. Its appeal is universal. The band is mindlessly and bombastically fun. Onstage, you’ll find one laptop, one drummer, one sinuous dancer and two parts boy/girl harmony, attitude and unabashed sex appeal. The Boy, Frank, has a hell of a voice.

In another era, he’d be crooning rather than rapping. Somehow, he manages to do both.

The Girl, Karen, is a bundle of pure energy, jumping, shouting and pouting simultaneously.

Jean-Eric is a young band, whose members haven’t completely captured the infectious energy of their live shows in the studio. Check out the studio version of Bull In A China Shop and then the video below. One is certain to leave you craving the other.

“Real World,” on the other hand, is a perfectly crafted studio song, lilting along in immaculate harmony. Both are painfully catchy, the calling card of a band just waiting to catch on.

Bull In A China Shop

Real World