“It’s a fight, keeping a healthy lifestyle,” says Vincent Roberge, smirking, running his hand through his freshly dyed orange and pink hair. The one we call Les Louanges presents his new album, Crash, like a documentary covering the years following the critical and popular success of his first album, The night is a panther, published in 2018. It is about tours, recognition, festive nights and less glorious aftermaths, disappointed loves, deep friendships and insomnia. “Healthy living is not yet won. Many things prevent me from sleeping. »
Vincent Roberge also recounts the time he returned from a tour of France to find that the ceiling in his bathroom had collapsed. “The ceiling had literally fallen into the bottom of my shower! I had just separated, moreover, I no longer had any furniture — it was loser my business is in shit… But at the same time, I had just had a great experience glamour, to give concerts in France. »
That’s it, the crash, summed up in three minutes on the title track of the album, an astonishing and successful duet with Corneille. “I’ve always had trouble explaining what kind of music I made,” says Vincent Roberge. Joke, Felix [Petit, coréalisateur] said to me: “You do conscious R&B”, as they say “conscious rap”. We were wondering who could be the king conscious R&B in Quebec. It could only be Corneille. The idea of a collaboration was germinated, it materialized at the chance of a meeting between the veteran and the young Roberge in the parking lot next to the studio.
“I told him about the album and what I wanted to say in the song. Crash. He sent me his verse — it was on point, on every level! From Corneille vintage 2002, he even dares to sing “after the rain the good weather”, I tripped! Above all, he understood where I was coming from with this album — the pun was not intentional! We may not have had the same life, but our journey is similar, in the sense that we both achieved sudden success in our early twenties. He understands that. »
Chisel the texts
This album begins with a brief Prologue “very Daptone Records, like Charles Bradley”, a soft funk reminiscent of the influence of jazz from the first songs of Les Louanges published on two mini-albums launched on the Web before his participation in the Francouvertes in 2017. “Despite the means at hand, I I’m going all the way / Fuck the microdose, I’m going all out”, sings Roberge, accompanied by flights of saxophone from Félix Petit, co-producer of the album, as on the previous one.
Two songs later, it’s the Bolero : “Three Felixes for my twenty-fourth birthday / Soiled in the following hours / The snow will soon have melted / On the backs of small statues / In an apartment party”. The artist’s life, with its “mornings[s] in a new town / The coffee and the pot of Advil”. On the amazing simple What are you doing to me?, Roberge camped his love at first sight in the flutes of champagne whistled at the New Year’s Day concert in Montreal, December 31, 2019, just before the start of the pandemic.
It’s like it, with him in the taxi bringing him drunk from theafter party of the ADISQ gala. This is what is most striking when discovering Crash : the vivacity of his pen, this way so clear that he has to tell us how he went through these last three or four years. “I’ve never worked so much on my lyrics as on this album,” says Vincent Roberge, recognizing in the same breath the influence of rap writing in his prose – more than in his musical direction this time. The effort paid off: more intimate, more direct, Crash testifies to the evolution of the author-composer-performer, in terms of writing as much as in terms of the themes addressed.
Thus, we remain first seized by the text of Chaperone, which expresses the rage to learn that a friend was the victim of a sexual assault. This is, unfortunately, one of the musical documentary episodes of recent years in the existence of Les Louanges.
“Well… it’s not complicated, explains Roberge, weighing her words. The unthinkable happened to the girlfriend of one of my best buddies. I experienced this situation very closely. If each of the songs on the album represents a defining moment in my life… Well that’s really one”, delicate to approach, insists the musician. “I can’t understand that, I could never understand that. On the other hand, what I can tell is what I experienced during the course of all that, as a form of testimony. My goal was not to send a message and it is not me, Les Louanges, who speaks: this word belongs to women. Everything we want to do, we, the boys, is to discuss it,” he says, adding that he had the blessing of his friends to include this powerful song on the album.
Follow your instincts
On the musical level, Roberge has also surpassed himself, and sublimated the influences that have defined him: jazz, funk, R&B, new wave, pop song. He recorded “almost 70%” of the album on his own, carefully choosing each synth sound, each bass line idea, even writing the drum scores, finding 30% inspiration from his friend Félix Petit and ingenuity needed to achieve that distinctive blend of groove and song-to-text. He willingly quotes Dirty Projectors, hip-hop-electronic composer Jpegmafia, Stevie Wonder, The answering machine des Colocs (on the poignant ballad Easy) and the album Sign o’ the Times (1987) by Prince, but points out “that this album is much less glued to my influences” than was The night is a panther.
“I followed my instinct by doing what I wanted to listen to myself,” he says. I know a little more where I’m going, I understood what I wanted, what touches me in a song. For example, for me, conciseness is important: if you’re able to make everyday sentences poetic, then you’ve won. »
“Some might say that the album is a bit dark, difficult, he anticipates. Still, it’s like life in general — I say that without wanting to do great philosophy. Then, once you accept that, you sort of enter adulthood. As in this sentence, I don’t know which writer, who says: “Life is never as good or as bad as you think” [Guy de Maupassant, Une vie, 1883]. It’s funny, because I always say, “Life is always duller than it’s supposed to be”. Finally, when it feels like the end of the world, it’s never that bad, but the great moments are also not so hot only that. That’s what adult life is, and it’s okay like that, and it’s beautiful like that. »