1. A thousand works, my heart, Salome Leclerc
After listening, already familiar songs. After the second, several are permanently nested in recesses of the heart. After three times, the entire album has taken its place. It had not yet happened to Salomé Leclerc: it took time for it to penetrate. Why such immediacy this time? She discovered the choruses, that’s all. Louis-Jean Cormier encouraged her to take this new taste for structures even further. Result: his best album, nothing less.
2. Like a love song, Gilles Vigneault
The inexhaustible songwriter personifies in inspired words and surprisingly varied music – under the remarkable artistic direction of Jim Corcoran – what is essential to life, here as everywhere: Madam water, Sir air, Madam light… Without fearing the wonder of language, our national Vigneault talks about what matters: climate change, the depletion of natural resources, the loss of collective memory and of the built heritage. A masterpiece at 93? But if !
3. Frame of a Fauna, Ouri
After years of making a name for herself on dance floors, Ourielle Auvé has reached a remarkable level of maturity and sophistication with Frame of a Fauna, an intimate and visionary first album. Between author’s song, avant-garde electronic music and contemporary music, the artist reveals herself in a new light, as she had done a few months earlier with the astonishing duo Hildegard that she forms with Helena Deland, a another favorite of 2021.
4. Wild Things II, Wild Things
This second disc constitutes a fantastic leap forward for Choses Sauvages, which expresses in 12 long and sweet songs the irrepressible desire to dance which has inhabited us during this year when the thing was rightly banned. The group has chosen to wait until next April to offer these infectious people in concert grooves post-disco-new-wave-synth-funk, praying that the variants stay away from dance floors. Choses Sauvages, the most efficient and inspired dance machine of the moment.
5. My delirium, Myriam Gendron
Seven years after setting Dorothy Parker’s poems to music, a poignant double album allows her to emerge for good. The work exists in its own space-time, presenting a repertoire of the past with a contemporary sensibility. Drawing on songs from Quebec as well as from the United States, Gendron combines the blues with our folklore in a touching way, with his sober and authentic voice and his electric and acoustic guitars. The late revelation of the year.
6. The tour of the great wood, Edith Butler
Bombarded director, her team as reinforcement, Lisa LeBlanc wanted to give the eternal fiery the corresponding voice. Not too smooth. “I wanted to bring out Edith’s roots. The little girl from Paquetville. To get out her accent and a raw side of her. It is more than successful. It fits in like a ton of logs. Observation: they are the same. Neither the age gap nor the differences in musical tastes come into play when such forces are present. And wham !
7. Eastern Normal, Connoisseur Ticaso
The year 2021 in Quebec music began with the probeEastern Normal, published on 1er January. For the veteran MC, the double album confirmed his comeback after years of silence. Supported by rhythms sometimes old school, sometimes in tune with the rap trends of the moment, Ticaso empties his heart by evoking his not always simple journey while bearing witness to life “in the street”. His verve and his authentic speech even earned him the Felix for rap album of the year.
8. At night, the echoes, Émilie Proulx
It must be said very loudly: his new songs, like those of the four discs released too discreetly since 2007, are alt-folk wonders flirting with the best pop, jewels of arrangements which set a subject that is still relevant. Often serious, but gently serious. She’s bright dark black, Émilie. She is a loner and gregarious, who likes to accompany as much as to create, sing alone AND with others. Let’s weigh our words: it is the most important misunderstood in our country of music.
9. Laval Rhapsody, Luc de Larochellière
Difficult to describe, except in big words: fresco, rhapsody. Prosaically, let’s say it’s a book whose chapters correspond to the songs on a record, and it’s also a collage from family photos, cut-out illustrations, all cobbled together with a felt tip pen and brushes by an eternal gifted young boy. In other words, a complete work to remember that, where we come from, it is (almost) always beautiful like childhood. Even in Laval.
10. Sentients, CRAB
The touch of madness we needed at the right time, with the arrival of spring and the hope of a summer less stuck than the previous one. The experimental punk duo invited their gang (Only, Vincent Peake, Yuki and Benoît Poirier from Jesuslesfilles, Hubert Lenoir, etc.) in the studio, as if to thumb their noses at the virus. Absurd, outlet, aggressive but never enraged, all with the aim of exorcising “the evils that we experience every day and the new beginnings which follow”, specifies the duo.
11. Three Little Words, Dominique Fils-Aimé
The singer-songwriter signs with the superb Three little words the end of a trilogy that began in 2018 which has truly revealed her as one of the essential voices in our musical landscape. By imagining a fusion between soul, R&B, jazz and blues, the musician offered a reflection on the past, the present and the future of the African-American minority, this last delicious part evoking moreover her own emancipation with even more intimate themes.
12. Musivision, Laurence-Anne
What pleases the most when you dive back into Musivision, second album by singer-songwriter Laurence-Anne, is to see her now shine with her own fires, far from the shadow of Klô Pelgag to whom she has often been compared. Produced by Félix Petit, accomplice of Les Louanges, the album propels the musician into the groove synthetic funk and dreamy electronic pop, colors, textures and rhythms that highlight the diaphanous voice of the performer.
13. The sky is on the floor, Louis-Jean Cormier
Almost a story album. The story in chapters of a mourning, that of the father of Louis-Jean, who died in January 2020. A moving record, necessarily, but not dramatizing. Yes, we have the right to have the motton. The songs would rebel, otherwise. It is about expressing what is unspeakable in mourning. And universally intimate. Because it is also a record of mourning experienced in the middle of a pandemic. A shared mourning, therefore, with time and a lot of travel between Sept-Îles and Montreal to think about it.
14. Ocean girl, Geneviève Binette
When, one day, we realize that surf rock is liberating, we can’t help but go back to the crest of the wave, to feel it all. Even sadness has ants in its legs, and the guitars lift as much as they resonate. In We go up to heaven, sensuality tastes of salt. We go underwater, the sparkling very pop – surf – yé-yé song which closes the disc, is a real indictment against cynicism, coupled with a manifesto splashing with hope. The enjoyable album of the year.
15. PICTURA DE IPSE: Direct music, Hubert Lenoir
After the success of Darlene, it would have been easy for Hubert Lenoir to continue to exploit this fruitful rock vein seventies. Rather, he bet on daring by getting closer to his exploded musical loves (electronic pop, neo-R & B, rap, experimental music) to offer this album more demanding, but above all more intimate, complex and revealing. We salute the gesture as much as its uncompromising result, a record like no other released in this particularly rich year for Quebec music.