Extreme dancing pop, you might say. Disco if necessary. Radio to the bone. On purpose. Brazilian carnival sarabande for Viva the avatar, frenzy on the dance floor of the 1970s for The dream is quite beautiful, retro reverberated to the Discomotion and other Rockcollection for In a thousand pieces, Patrick Juvet-style beach attendant guaranteed on invoice for Too short in summer : the intention is obvious and the choruses very, very winning. Alexandre Désilets does not take it easy in the pulse to convey the desperate happiness of his “happy people”. He readily agrees. “It goes beyond the exercise of style. To explore the world of appearances, there is nothing like pop. “
Viva the avatar spear Happy people, the eighth album of Alexandre Désilets if we include the saucettes with four or five titles, as we denounce ourselves. From the outset. I is another Rimbaldian is now conjugated in the plural, I is all others. Serial avatars, unique and the same at the same time: “I deduce the true by the false / I resolve to icons / Some or zeros / My loneliness is the sum”, sings nicely and gently Alexandre. Viva the avatar lets hum, the bodies sway pleasantly: “The colder, the hotter / The silicone film / Gives the illusion of the skin”.
The vital surface of things
Even if the process is revealed, the strings as big as the cable of a cruise ship in Venice, we let ourselves be carried away, it is irresistible. “Something tragic is happening, for sure, but because it’s brought in the form of happy pop, we rejoice because the need to exult is really strong. We hear that in a Katy Perry, there is often a slightly cynical, sour message, and the music surfs above the subject. You may never realize it. “
It has indeed been very possible in recent months to turn up the sound of the three consecutive radio extracts from the album. Happy people and, in the first degree of the title, jiggling around in your car seat: maybe you’ve already seen it? And what did you take away from these songs? Maybe nothing but air, maybe more. “Me, it has always struck me, this weight of words, under the singing or dancing surface of things. The sugar on the burden of life makes me feel the burden even more. It accentuates, rather than softens. “
He gives Stromae as an example. ” To write Papaouté, a rather terrible text on the effects of the absence of the father, can be seen on a dance floor from the 1990s. It allows whoever receives the song to adhere to a high level of coolness, to identify with the message while remaining cool. For who wants to go there, it is there, clearly. “
Family clowns
The cover photo of Alexandre’s new album is terribly clear: we see four clowns in a harsh light, crackled makeup, who could not give the change even if they were smiling. “It’s my dad, my brother and two of his friends. They were doing acrobatic circus. The photo grabs them just before they take the stage. They are transparent, we see sadness, loneliness, fatigue too. This is a completely real photo of clowns. And the truth is also that I pay tribute to my parents, to this art of entertaining people, which they mastered in all circumstances, regardless of their state of mind. “
The truth, what makes real good pop, is precisely the honesty of the approach, even if it is to expose the artifices, make-up and other disguises of life in society. All the songs were recorded first… guitar-vocals. In a chalet. Alexandre sang, wrote, his sidekick Jean-François Beaudet played, picking, strumming, setting up structures that hold together, refrains that rise and rhythms that dance. When bassist Rémy Malo and drummer Robbie Kuster joined in, in the studio, all they had to do was jump into the void like family acrobats: additions, metamorphoses, everyone was going to fall back on their feet.
There is great connivance between Jean-François and Alexandre: it has lasted since the Ma première Place des Arts competition in 2006, where the interpretation of the song I fail revealed this extraordinary voice to everyone. “What we hear are the models made in pairs, with flesh around the bone. As in the photo of the acrobatic clowns, there was nothing to touch up, or almost. “It’s an album where I sing ‘I won’t let you see everything / I hide the troubles / In the mirror room / Send your desires back to you’, but it is at the same time my most real record, the most direct, and if I may say so, the most authentic. It is not his avatar who will say the opposite.