Grief alters scale. A room becomes a chapel, a shirt becomes a relic, a song once heard in passing acquires the weight of fate. For Be My Wife, the project of the Paris-based creative director Federico Nessi, music arrives with that kind of double exposure: part performance, part offering, part self-invention undertaken at a moment when the old coordinates of a life have given way.
That doubleness gives unusual force to Nessi’s cover of the Breeders’ Off You, a song already marked by frailty, distance, and intimate exhaustion. The circumstances of this recording press close to the skin. “I’m now working on new music and planning some performances in the summer. But in the middle of all this, my father passed away… April 12th would have been his birthday, so I endeavored to develop a cathartic offering to him. I’ve been listening to a lot of Title TK by The Breeders, and Off You is the song I’ve always loved the most off that album. In the last few weeks, I read that the song was written by Kim Deal while she was caring for her sick mother. Having taken care of my father for the past two years, I took that as a sign and decided to make a cover of it for my dad’s birthday. Initially, I wasn’t planning on properly producing it or releasing it, but over the weekend, I kept being sucked deeper and deeper into the creative process.”
The cover recasts Off You through a somber electronic frame that faintly recalls John Foxx’s Metamatic era, with its clean synthetic surfaces, blue-lit remove, and human feeling held just beneath the glass. The video is simple: a one-take performance by Nessi, dressed in his father’s clothing, ending with the lighting of a birthday candle. Yet simplicity here carries unusual pressure. The borrowed garments place memory in plain view; the candle, modest and ceremonial, turns the frame into a site of address. You feel a son reaching across absence with whatever remains at hand: voice, fabric, breath, ritual. The cover honors the Breeders’ original while opening a narrow passage into private mourning, and through that passage, something almost unbearable becomes briefly shareable.
Watch the video for Off You below:
Nessi has spent more than two decades moving through image-making, performance, and the long private apprenticeship of devotion to music, and this venture gathers those experiences into a form at once theatrical and painfully direct. Its sensibility draws from post-punk, no wave, industrial, and goth, yet it also makes room for the suave ache of the classic crooner, for camp wit, for queer contradiction, for the small absurdities by which people survive devastation. The name itself, borrowed from a beloved David Bowie song and a Max Linder film, contains that tension between romance and performance, ardor and artifice.
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Photos by ALIX BORTOLI
The post French Experimental Synthpop Artist Be My Wife Shares Video for Cathartic Cover of The Breeders “Off You” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
