Applaud, camel band. It is not us who say it, we would never dare. This is the title of Larynx’s second album, one of those fabulous jokers hiding his melancholy behind a barrage of absurd or false nonos lyrics.
Posted at 4:30 p.m.
Professor Smart. Dear Jean-Prune. The mareux highway. At first glance, Alexandre Larin does not approach the art of song with the same seriousness that keeps so many musicians away from this essential ingredient of a good album: pleasure.
After Hive of flies in 2020, the whimsical artist responding to the name of a cartilaginous organ testifies on this second disc to a musical omnivorism similar to that of a Kurt Vile, a Navet Confit, or a Jimmy Hunt, with whom Larynx shares this same elegance in the impertinence and the déglingue. Keyboardist and saxophonist Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux, one of the main architects of Love sickness (2013), has also collaborated on 4 of the 17 pieces co-produced by the artist with Étienne Dupré (Caltâr-Bateau) and Jonathan Charette (Le Roi Poisson).
Omnivorism and elegance? It’s because our joker has the encyclopedic knowledge of a record collector with irreproachable taste. It borrows in particular from baroque pop (Mauricie), to the country of the desert (beautiful beam), kinksesque rock (I drew a heart in the snow), mild psychedelia (Space tesswhose text does not seem to be fiction) and shoegaze (Hafenafthe ode to sharing that My Bloody Valentine never dared to record).
Behind his apparently absurd refrains, Larynx nevertheless speaks of serious subjects such as the strangeness of desire (licorice love), the harshness of disappointment in love (You have changed so much) or the alienating weight of everyday life (Balliterie (Champion)), one of the greatest songs ever written about this Sisyphean task of taking out the trash).
Julian Casablancas would only have to learn French and voila, the Strokes could add a hit to their repertoire by taking up the very, very heady Tomorrow, I’m talking to nobody. That’s exactly what we’ll be doing tomorrow: not talking to anyone, the better to listen to Larynx.
indie-rock
Applaud, camel band
Larynx
Well well well