The beginning of the evening suggested solid showers which would have softened the party on Friday evening, but the jet currents fortunately decided otherwise. Vincent Roberge, alias Les Louanges, was able to shout at the Francos, for what was in a way the pinnacle of the course of his last album Crash. The festival had given him the stage he deserved — the Place des Festivals — at the right time, on a Friday evening at rush hour, 9 p.m.
“I have a broken wrist and I’m coming to give my best show of my life,” chanted the singer, brandishing his forearm with a splint, standing right in the middle of an already large crowd. Les Louanges then gently joined the good dozen musicians and singers all dressed in red who were waiting for him on the big stage.
Then Roberge set the scene. “I was born in Lévis. I come from a family of lumberjacks, jobbers and artists, he said. My music is deeply Québécois, but dependent on hip-hop, R&B and Afro-American music”.
The here and the elsewhere in perfect fusion, this is somewhat the essence of this musical project, which on Friday evening left a lot of room for the richness of the compositions of Les Louanges and its saxophonist Félix Petit.
Les Louanges essentially bet on the songs of Crash for the first half of his show, with among others Pavement, Bolero, Again And Cruze. “Summer promises to be respectable,” he sang on this piece as he wandered around the stage, as if possessed by the energy of the synthesizers.
Then resonated the voice of Gaston Miron, sampled in his play Gaston, before resounding La nuit est une panthère, carried by the loud singing of a crowd with stamps, it seemed to us, quite feminine. And now, despite the damaged wrist, Roberge, soaking wet, grabs her electric guitar to carry the piece.
After a start without too many respites, Les Louanges took a short tender break with his piece Darlingbefore making the even larger crowd languish before starting Pigeons, perhaps his best piece. “Careful greetings, distinguished feelings”, he delivers. It was about.
After one Jupiter on the 220 volts, the magnificent bittersweet piece Easy replaced the chakras before the last sprint. The cellphones turned on, the droplets pearled gently from the sky, and Roberge was disheveled like a pitou, the one in the song that followed shortly after.
After an hour and a half of music including a reminder where he delivered the old TercelLes Louanges concluded “the biggest show of [sa] life “. An evening that may have turned out to be sober in surprises, but dense in energy and strong in quality. All this with a broken wrist. And as it all came to an end, the sky emptied over downtown.