Les Biches: Gentlemen Sailing into Darkness    “I won’t pretend discarded dreams will cease to be.” - Les Biches, “Lost Again”      In his fascinating book on Leonard Cohen, A Broken Hallelujah, author Liel Leibovitz isolates what he believes to be the secret sauce in the art that haunts us: the duende— "that profound and nebulous sadness we all feel but can’t easily articulate.” It’s the metaphorical catch in the throat, the melancholy epiphany. And it’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the music of Les Biches (pronounced “lay-beesh”), an LA-based collective with an impressive pedigree and a powerful new album titled Gentlemen Sailing into Darkness. But this is duende with a caveat. “For me there is a distinction,” says primary songwriter Keith Joyner, “between conveying a profound sadness and acknowledging that we inhabit a sad and beautiful world. I tend to focus on the idea that life inevitably includes suffering along with fleeting moments of joy. And recent experience has really hammered that home.” Les Biches’ music is more wistful than brooding, traversing a variety of genres and tempos. It often rocks, as in the case of “Fool Dawn, ” “You The Obscure,” and the mesmerizing lead single “Lost Again”; it jangles in “Search Party”; in “Common Law” it edges into electro-pop. Always there is a keen sense of melody, a musical dexterity tightly corralled to the needs of the song, and a seeming inability to waste a single note. This is classic songcraft coupled with an openness to the unknown.      Named after a Jaques Brel song and a 1968 French film, Les Biches is very much an anything-goes affair. Begun initially as an open-ended collaborative project whose sole constant member was Joyner, the current lineup of Joyner, Chris Candelaria (bass), Dusty Starr (guitars), and Kevin Pinnt (drums) coalesced in the wake of attempted reunions of Revolux and Chihuahua, two 1990s-era LA bands. While the challenge of reanimating those long-disbanded groups proved insurmountable, there emerged a desire among some of the members to consolidate forces and carry the momentum forward.  “I think it has been good mental exercise for all of us to get into a room and play,” says Joyner. “And that's how this collection of songs was recorded. It was our goal to capture that history that we share and lend the recordings the unspeakable live energy of those two bands.”    That shared history is long and deep. In addition to the groups noted above, members of Les Biches have played in The The, Caterwaul, and Seven Simons. Twinstar, a 15-year collaboration between Joyner and Candelaria, yielded four albums, including 2013’s stunning The Sound of Leaving. But amidst all the stylistic evolutions, there remains, especially in the Joyner/Candelaria partnership, an implied through-line: the idea of music, not so much as a path to somewhere else or in service to something higher, but as its own sacred space. And that may be the purest form of transcendence there is. “It’s exceedingly easy to find things to distract us from the cruel practical joke of the ticking clock,” says Joyner. “I never had religion to mitigate that fear, so the only place I know to channel it is through music.” His song “Search Party” puts it more starkly: “I couldn’t find a faith worth keeping.” Perhaps not, but the enthralling art Joyner and his fellow alchemists have created here is worth believing in. Gentlemen Sailing Into Darkness is both a next chapter and a beginning, an invitation and a welcome home.                                                                                                                                     -Robert Dean Lurie