New York - Warhaus is the artistic alter ego and solo recording project of Maarten Devoldere, who fronts the soulful Belgian rock band Balthazar, along with Jinte Deprez. Warhaus’ debut album We Fucked A Flame Into Being will be released on September 2nd (Play It Again Sam Records). The first single, “The Good Lie,” was released May 12th. It’s a sexy, mysterious track, with the music video making for modern film noir. Devoldere echoes Tom Waits in the sultry number.
The title of the album, We Fucked A Flame Into Being, is a direct quote from Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence. Devoldere asserts it was “too good to pass on!” It’s a fitting title for an album “where every song celebrates the inscrutability of encounters and pays tribute to the decadence and intensity that life can offer.”
Maarten Devoldere has long kept his Warhaus persona under the radar, but now he has fully exposed himself, owning the enigmatic lyrics, “fueled by desire and love, haunted by a hunger for the fleeting, yearning to express the unsayable.” Illusion and disillusion transpose, but it is all a lie, with Warhaus sowing seeds of despair in his unstable world: “You want magic, count me in / You want Jesus, well I’m not him / You’re an angel or a whore / Tell me who you’re working for / Loving you isn’t easy you know / But it’s a motherfucker not to do so.” (“I’m Not Him”)
“I love contradictions,” asserts Devoldere. “They are musically very appealing to me: raw vs. fundamentally passionate, brutal vs. romantic, art vs. Kitsch, archaic vs. modern.” We Fucked A Flame Into Being draws inspiration from Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg and cleverly merges fifty years of music history, soaked in the French sixties, a touch of exoticism, and careless apathy.
“I’m at the end of my twenties now. With this record I close an important period,” says Devoldere. “It’s an ode to love, to its excesses and elusiveness. Though love songs are a form of advertising: you portray a woman and the listener should fall in love with her too.”
TRACKLISTING
01. I’m Not Him
02. The Good Lie
03. Against The Rich
04. Leave With Me
05. Beaches
06. Machinery
07. Memory
08. Wanda
09. Bruxelles
10. Time And Again