Review
Genre and Mood
Jeanne Added’s A War Is Coming is dark, intense and haunting, a post-punk and darkwave song built on electronic programming. A live reviewer heard her debut album as hope-filled cold-wave and post-punk calls to tenderness, but this single warns rather than consoles.
Song Summary
A War Is Coming was released on 1 December 2014 as the first single from Be Sensational, Jeanne Added’s debut album on Naïve, which followed on 1 June 2015. She wrote the music and lyrics; Dan Levy produced, recorded and mixed it at the Watchtower Studio, and the two arranged it together. Added plays bass and keys, Levy keyboards, drums and programming. In two and a half minutes the song warns of a war that is coming and builds that warning out of rhythm and voice.
Musical Breakdown
Intro: A Crowded Voice
WGBH’s review describes the song opening to a brooding, intimidating and crowded vocal: the militaristic mood is there from the first seconds.
Verse 1: The March
A simple, repetitive melody thumps over a stuttered march rhythm, the military image of the title turned into a beat.
Build-up: Choirs of One
As the song progresses, Added layers her own voice into responsive choirs singing ascending oh-whoas, which the review hears as threatening and impending.
Outro: No Release
The sources do not describe how the song ends; at 2:35 it is over before the war arrives.
Concepts in Focus
The choirs are vocal harmony of a particular kind: every voice is Added’s own, multi-tracked. Stacking a single voice makes a crowd that still sounds like one person, which suits a song in which one voice warns many.
Those choirs are also call and response: WGBH calls them responsive, voices answering the lead line rather than simply doubling it. The answers climb as they go, so each reply raises the tension.
The music video embedded here is the official clip, directed by François Devulder and produced by Le Groupuscule; we found no description of what it shows, so watch it with fresh eyes.
Artistic Context
Added was born in Reims in 1980 and studied cello and classical singing there before entering the jazz class of the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique de Paris in 2001, then studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She sang with many jazz musicians and, about a decade before WGBH’s review, took up the electric bass. Signing with Naïve in 2014, she made Be Sensational with Dan Levy of The Dø; like the Paris band behind Poni Hoax, Olga Kouklaki – Budapest, she sings in English.
Impact and Reception
WGBH named it a song you should know: few songs match mood to text so well. Be Sensational earned Added a 2016 Victoires de la musique nomination for album revelation, and in 2019 she won best female artist. Turn it up and let the choirs close in.
