The excitement was at its height last Saturday evening at the first of two concerts given by Angèle at the Bell Centre, where she had already performed in 2019. The Belgian musician remembered: “It’s one of my best memories of the Brol Tour”, she confided to her fans before interpreting Time will do, in the middle of a generous singing tour of more than two hours, surrounded by six dancers and a small orchestra of four musicians. The excitement was at its height, but Angèle contained it over an evening carrying the more thoughtful atmosphere of her second album. Ninety-Fivepublished a year and a half ago.
It was anticipated, but still striking: it was not quite the same Angèle yesterday as before the pandemic. No longer the same as the 22-year-old Angèle who tasted mass success for the first time thanks to the pop bombs of her first album brol (2018). Five years doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a century of stage and life experience that the singer-songwriter decants in the album Ninety-Fivemuch less cheerful and vigorous than the previous one.
She reminded us of this over these two long, and sometimes long, hours marked by an abundance of pop ballads with an R&B flavor. More Meanings and Positive Thoughts in opening (with You’re looking at meof the second edition of Brol, between the two) set the scene, also sober, based on games of lighting and an LED screen in the background, used with such parsimony that we sometimes forgot to pay attention, which has the merit of focusing on Angèle and the excellent dancers who accompanied her – well done for the choreographies, which formed pretty pictures.
Early in the evening, Angèle swung, not your what so early, but two other bombs from the first album, Yes or no and the flawless To forget everything. The Bell Center then became a gigantic karaoke, the crowd burying the voice of the singer, who only had to stretch the microphone to hear her own words. This Saturday evening, the show was as much on the floor and in the bleachers as on stage: a majority of young girls, accompanied by their parents or grandparents, several who, obviously, were attending their first major show, the one they will remember all their lives.
However, after To forget everything, the energy dropped a notch or two as the musician chained compositions reflecting the introspection and questioning that marked the pandemic of Angèle – and, let’s be clear, of pretty much everyone too. It was pretty, the electro-pop groove very (too?) faithfully articulated by its musicians (a drummer, a guitarist, two keyboardists) and embodied by the dancers and Angèle herself, who above all does not lack charisma, but without overflows, without overflows.
Angèle recognized it herself when she sat down alone at the little piano that we had rolled to the front of the stage “to stay within the theme of sad songs”, offering in particular a rich interpretation of Taxi. For Stormthe rain streamed on a diaphanous curtain momentarily separating us from the star, while the burst of lightning cracked the screen behind the scenes, it had its effect.
The Belgian recovered at the end of the course, offering a bouquet of more rhythmic and dancing songs, among which the essential duet with Dua Lipa entitled Fever and the feminist anthem Swing your whatanother one she didn’t even need to sing anymore, fans knowing her by heart.
Less sparkling than during the Brol tour, but more tender and thoughtful, Angèle — who spent some time with her fans on Saturday afternoon, in an ephemeral souvenir shop on rue Saint-Denis — made us spend a beautiful evening at which, however, lacked that touch of madness and audacity that it expressed so vividly in its early days.