2023-06-09 07:00:00
Swipe. Steps from the door, remnants of a priori, good and bad faith. Paranoïa, Angels, True Love is more than nothing, it’s a huge disc. A tour de force, as one would say of a Philharmonie with audacious shapes rather than a guitar solo full of notes. «From where I stand, everything is glorious», whispers Chris in the intro, and we can write only a minimum, and unlike the previous Redcar et the adorable stars, an album of extreme audacity which had rightly put off some of them (the artist himself would have been worried about the contrary), we stand, listening to it, exciting (for the breadth) and trying (for the length) of it, at its side. Alongside Madonna, too, who is the Jiminy Cricket-style storyteller, the Angel of History or the eye of Sauron more than the deluxe backing vocalist or the surety – audacity! Chris, there, is a star, who made a record of star, of glory, at the best moment of his career, that is to say the most risky.
Think: Madonna, speaking of her, era Ray of LightBjörk at the time ofHomogenic, Paul’s Boutique des Beastie Boys, Around the World in a Day of Prince. Records that have blackballed everything, the pressure of success, the expectations of the massive audience, even the money itself. Who can dare to do that today, in the era of streaming, when almost no one, apart from boomers and critics, listens to albums, precisely? Those who have followed Chris from the historic success of Human warmth (1 million albums sold) to the great plunge of Redcar will retort that the Frenchman has nothing more to risk, that he burned everything with his adorable starsyes Paranoïa, Angels, True Love has a challenge to take up, it is that of repairing the bridges which it dynamited with the general public.
Free escape
But the viewing angle is bad. Chronologically, Chris had started the most ambitious record of his career to date before the other, the one seen as a dead weight, a messed up side. And it is by working there, closely, with the giant of American pop Mike Dean, that he opened the floodgates, made the dam collapse to the last sections of concrete. Its release today sheds light on everything, the adorable stars and the true meaning of the free escape: the desire for great pop music, and a thick notebook of ideas for music and poetry, original, excellent, sometimes extraordinary to make it happen. No crazy puff; but a music that is indeed delirious, in the sense of the highest creative delirium (“all madness is accepted today as long as it is recreational, the definition of this last word being left to “creatives” or to the “public” made statistical which is the same thing”said Deleuze).
It’s quite clear, we have never heard such a disc, such a hybridity, such an operatic, blockbusterian, baroque incarnation. Songs on a thread, lengthened with drones and hallucinatory tableaux. Bilingual audacities (“I don’t remember what I did / I think my keys were on the table / Do you really love me / On this table”). Symphonic rawness on a bed of melodic percussion, Varèse, trap music and Jean-Claude Vannier in the same room. Cold psychedelia (incredible Track 10woven around a fat synthesizer sample by Emerson Lake & Palmer), false bad idea (Pachelbel vampirized in all pop innocence, iridescent with an unstoppable chorus, on Full of Life), luminous ballad à la Suzanne Vega (Flowery Days), refrains princiens sans (Tears Can Be So Soft) or with Wendy & Lisa (Lick the Light Out). Crazy ideas, good or better than good, innumerable, beyond references, eras (seventies, eighties, nineties, noughties, November 2021 or June 2023 in the same machine) and roots, since it’s a record of wherever Chris wants to see himself, France in his veins and California at his fingertips (where he exists and is desired, no offense to the bad neighbors).
Gorgeous
A record that works, with and thanks to his voice, his soul, his singing, this weapon. And what a voice, what a weapon – suspended, serpent of air; or a ball of fire that needs nothing more than an advancing beat and a few samples filtered down to not much to stir, move, swaddle in emotion. Chris has never sung so well, so powerfully, so emotionally, he is magnificent and so often surprising, new, Stina Nordenstam, Dionne Warwick or Liz Fraser, audible proof of an artist in full possession of his means and a complete mutation into a very great artist, whose Paranoïa, Angels, True Love would be the first major album. We’re probably getting carried away, but throw the first stone at us: pop needs us to get carried away with it to live, Chris is alive with us, let’s not let him escape us.
#vault #Christine #chapel #Liberation