THE LIMINANAS

The Limiñanas – Faded

“Can I have your autograph?” He said to the plump blonde actress, “You know, I know everything you’ve done,” sings Doug Yule on “New Age” by Velvet Underground. Love and violence towards an actress who spanned decades, a star considered faded.

This is the story of the new album by the Limiñanas, which once again shines a spotlight on so-called fallen stars. To the forgotten women who, from the 1950s to today, have disappeared from screens as if by a cruel spell, condemned by the passage of time. Voracious cinephiles, aware that the sordid emerges when one scratches beneath Hollywood glamour, Lionel and Marie Limiñana wanted to pay tribute to them here.

Without being militant, featuring a hybrid narrative, between (bad) waking dreams and tender metaphors, “Faded” unfolds as a rich soundtrack of a rarely told story, featuring numerous contributors: Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, Bertrand Belin, Rover, Anna Jean of Juniore, Penny, Jon Spencer… Each provides their own vision of the *Faded* storyline, creating what the Limiñanas describe as “an Italian patchwork,” where the pens of artists admired by Lionel and Marie are invited to express themselves fully. It creates a work echoing (and countering) the famous “Mignonne allons voir si la rose,” where Ronsard wrote, aware of ageism long before its time: “Gather, gather your youth / Like this flower, aging / Will tarnish your beauty.”

The result is a double album that opens with a multi-referential garage pop, full of emotions, before allowing even more space for contemplation and psychedelia, without forgoing venomous riffs. This is unmistakably the Limiñanas’ style. Always on drums, percussion, and vocals, particularly in a delightful cover of “Louie Louie” by Richard Berry: Marie Limiñana. On fuzz-drenched guitars, bass, and keyboards: Lionel Limiñana. The winning team remains unchanged, continuously innovating their discourse while staying viscerally true to themselves. In their Cabestany studio, Marie and Lionel surrounded themselves with their timeless collaborator Pascal Comelade and David Menke, who also handled the mixing.

Recent seasons have left little breathing room in the Limiñanas’ schedule, with three soundtracks in quick succession (*Heureux Gagnants*, *Les règles de l’art*, *Tigres et hyènes*) and the production of *Pick-up* by Brigitte Fontaine. Inspiration, however, is never in short supply. The couple constantly draws from the music they’ve always listened to (garage rock above all) as well as a dense imagery: 1960s Italian films, horror oddities like *Poltergeist*, and high-tension series like *Monsters*, among others.

From the opening instrumental theme, “Spirale,” one plunges into a garage-punk galaxy that’s both raw and dreamlike. Tempos accelerate under Bobby Gillespie’s guidance on “Prisoner of Beauty,” and Bertrand Belin delivers the existential anthem “J’adore le monde”: “off the mark, just beside it, not below, not just anywhere.” While “Shout” aptly recalls Rover’s rock essence, *Faded* highlights Penny’s charismatic voice. The “anti-heroine” Catherine is envisioned and embodied by Anna Jean. After the interlude “The Dancer,” the album reinvents Bernard Heidsieck’s poems (“Tu viens Marie?” and “Autour de chez moi”) and delivers two electrifying tracks crafted with Jon Spencer of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion: “Space Baby” and “Degenerate Star.”

Finally, the album closes with a sublime version of Phil Ochs’ “There but for Fortune,” immortalized in France by the late Françoise Hardy, as “Où va la chance.” “I see wounds / Never healed / I see the vagabond sleeping in the rain / And sometimes, I think / When I fall asleep in someone’s arms / Where does luck go / To you, to me?” For Marie and Lionel Limiñana, their luck lies in the beat of their hearts and the vibrations of their guitars, asserting that the outrage of time is just an illusion and that all art is eternal, regardless of its scars.