“Yeah well, love, death, and everything. This line by Dédé Fortin, taken from the song THE answering machine, goes back to the lips of Keith Kouna while we try to define the theme imposing itself in Metastases, his expansive, nourishing, exceptional fifth solo album: “Le bon vieux romantisme, eh? suggests Kouna. Death, love, these are inexhaustible themes that have been sung thousands of times, but there is always gas, flesh around the bone, meat… metastases to scratch. »
Metastases? “It’s the best title I’ve found, defuses Keith Kouna. It’s a nice word, I think anyway. It sounds good. It’s creepy, too. And that calls for numbers: they swarm, there are small ones, bigger ones”, like the songs on the album – they are twenty in number, very varied, from the thirty seconds of the ritornello G3A 1W8 to five languorous minutes ofAmerican : “I shift, I derail / Looking at my life / All these years / Underground / All these years”.
Death, therefore. ” Yes N. The cursed death”, Kouna escapes, looking away. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. But it seems so, it is more and more present. It’s a bit normal that she is more present, at 48 years old. I have one kid also, very young — I don’t know, it seems to be more concrete. Everyone else’s, anyway—in the past three weeks I’ve had two funerals, for a friend’s father and one of my uncles. We advance, it is sure that people fall in front of us. »
Not fatal, but squeaky
Metastases is however not a disastrous album, quite the contrary. “I’m very happy with the result,” said Keith Kouna. I didn’t know how it was going to come out: was it going to be two records? There will be two vinyls, but I never thought of this album as a double album, and it’s not a concept album, whereas The Winter Journey [2013] could have been one. On Metastases, there are playful rock things, other very dark ones; we mixed it all up, and it works. »
It even looks like it was recorded in four different studios, with four different orchestras, each of these sessions having its own colors. There’s that torturous rock sound, that of the magnificent Airplane in opening, Bunchepic Wreck at the end of the album, which instantly recall the atmosphere of the mythical MTV Unplugged in New York of Nirvana, published in 1994. The fiery, noisy and punks (including DBM), expected, even hoped, from the leader of one of the most important formations in the history of Quebec punk, the Goules. There are these reverent songs of the tradition, more French as on Accordion, American And Sharksmore American by its folk guitar in Marilyn And to the four winds.
Then the remarkable outbursts of cynicism that appear in Metastases like a warning shot: “Old people running around, it’s funny / It doesn’t want to die / It wants to last forever / It doesn’t want to die”. This is the full text of THE old people runningrecorded as if Charles Trenet had sung it, smiling, dapper, perky, still very much alive: “There is something sad to see in this despair, in this desire to hang on, to not want to die, to ‘to be eternal’, Kouna perceives.
Metastases is anything but a disastrous album: “This song lightens everything else, recognizes Kouna, but it’s very grating all the same. It was composed in an instant, this line, this jovial melody hummed into his telephone while he was “smoking a cigarette on the balcony”.
In front of the blank page, “I have no intention of leaving, he explains. It is often the tunes that decide the subject themselves. I never know what I’m going to sing. For each song, I start with the music, always. I improvise, I record, I listen again: “Ah! That’s no worse.” I’m looking for the tune, and the best words to put on it. The subject comes by digging”, the composition finds its meaning as Kouna sculpts its raw inspiration.
Mingle and roam
Six years — and a pandemic — have passed since his last solo album, Hello sheriff. In the meantime, a song called tabarnouchelaunched in the fall of 2020, a microalbum bringing together three other compositions intended for The Duchess of Langeais, a piece by Michel Tremblay presented at the Trident at the end of 2019. The first six months of the pandemic were, advises Keith Kouna, “pretty sterile. I didn’t do much”. After six months of statics, “I started working hard again. You write one. Worse a second. And three, and four, and all of a sudden, something takes shape”.
Metastases forms the most complete portrait of the range of the singer-songwriter’s register, which evokes as much Melvins as Trenet, Nirvana as Brel — the strength of Kouna the performer transcends Bye And The narrativetwo peaks of this album which conceals others —, Pantera than Renée Martel, to whom the last song of the album is dedicated, a tender country ballad called to the four winds. Kouna, fan of the “Golden Cowgirl”? “I’m a fan of songs,” he says. I listened to Renée like Marcel Martel. It’s an exercise in style. »
The oldest composition of the album, forgotten in a drawer since 2011. He had written it for Renée, had proposed to her, she had not chosen it for her album A free woman (2012). “Afterwards, I think I tried to pass it on to Guylaine Tanguay, he laughs. I showed it to Alex [Martel, réalisateur, collaborateur de Lou-Adriane Cassidy, Thierry Larose, entre autres], it was he who insisted: “You have to put it on, you have to put it on!” »
She concludes the album on a welcome note of hope. As an answer to a question, Keith Kouna recites part of the text ofAmerican “And the world, and the earth / And its fireworks / Its 4 p.m. bulletins / And its sad handjobs / Harden my arteries or endure boredom // Where is happiness?” »
“If I have always been pessimistic? I think so. Rebellious and angry too, sometimes, more on Good evening sheriff, where I was more in the denunciation and the social gaze. With Metastases, I return to my gray areas. “Death, and worse,” said Dédé. I’m a pessimist, yes, but at the same time, I’m a bon vivant. I don’t know… I like life, I don’t like the world, I don’t like myself, I like myself, I like the world. All that mixes and wanders. »