Discovery | The high potential of Douance

Alexandrine Rodrigue, alias Douance, is very good at doubting. But don’t doubt it, her first album, Monster, fulfills all its promises. Meeting with a worthy heir to 1990s rock and its female icons who knew how to drown their invasive thoughts in distortion.

In every cafe and bar in every town there is an employee a little older than all his colleagues, who knows music that no one else knows. In Saguenay, when Alexandrine Rodrigue was 18, this guy was called Ron, “the only Anglo in Chicout,” she jokes. “He made me playlists that he burned onto CDs. »

And on one of those lists were songs by Julie Doiron, Liz Phair, PJ Harvey, Bull in the Heather by Sonic Youth, sung by the coolest woman of the 1990s, Kim Gordon. A constellation of fiery female artists who embrace with as much abandon their fragility as their anger, the abrasiveness of their guitars as the thousand nuances of their voices. Musicians who will become for Alexandrine like guides towards her own truth.

“Ron’s playlist helped me unblock a lot of things in my head, to realize that I like when music is made by people who don’t play their instruments perfectly,” she explains in its rehearsal room in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

Find the courage

A dozen years later – Alexandrine will soon be 30 – the musician continues to work on “unblocking business”, a process in which she engaged somewhat reluctantly in 2019, by forcing herself to write, for the first time in his life, his own songs. Although she has been playing the six-string since adolescence, and is part of the folk group Chassepareil, the native of Laterrière had never dared to speak out personally.

“I have a lot of performance anxiety,” says the woman whose first album, Monster, is composed (approximately) of 50% distortion and 50% of existential questions as insoluble as they are anxiety-provoking. “I had to find myself back against the wall. »

This wall would be presented to him by his father. In February 2019, Papa Rodrigue organized a show by New Brunswick icon Julie Doiron in Tadoussac. The same Julie Doiron as the one on the CD cut by Ron. And he offers his daughter to be the opening act. “If I had said no, I would have been so upset,” she recalls. We had to quickly build up a repertoire.

And because everything can’t always go as badly as in the disasters we script for ourselves, the show will turn out pretty well. To the point where Dany Placard, Julie’s lover, will offer to make her EP. EP on which Julie Doiron plays drums. “I couldn’t believe it. I wrote to Ron to tell him. »

Irony and empowerment

Few artists are as inclined as Alexandrine Rodrigue to talk in interviews about the irresolution of their relationship with their own album. “Stop worrying/About everything and nothing/Tell yourself that maybe it’s better this way/And if everything goes to shit/There’s surely something that’s not so bad,” she sings in Worries, the greatest moment of optimism Monster.

“That’s not the line I’m most proud of,” she laughs about the phrase with the word that begins with “ch,” while being assured that it’s This is our favorite passage from this album innervated from start to finish by a tension between the absolute necessity to express oneself and the fear of making a mistake. “I think I’m still a little self-conscious about having chosen such a crude twist. »

Her project is called Douance, not because she herself was evaluated by a specialist who would have confirmed to her that she lives with high potential, but because she wanted to instill courage in herself at the moment of birth artistically.

“I chose that name to try to stop not having confidence in myself,” she says of what is therefore a curious mixture of irony andempowerment.

“Because actually, I never thought I was very good. It’s not true that creating feels good all the time. I often worry that the result won’t be up to par, but in the end, doing what you deeply want to do is always worth it, no matter how difficult the path is. »

In tribute to Gommette

Co-directed by Vivianne Roy of Hay Babies – “I wanted to work with a woman, a badass woman” – Monster is the raspy and dreamy work of a subscriber to anxiety, who tries to muzzle the small – and monstrous – voice which whispers to her that she does not have what it takes.

“It’s an album about feeling inadequate,” she sums up, referring to the cat on the cover, Gommette, her childhood pet, dressed in a doll’s dress in the photo, and visibly not happy to be thus adorned. “It’s also a reminder that you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously. »

Grunge

Monster

Giftedness

Costume Records