His fourth album, “Chrysalide”, after “Sourire carnivore” (2018), “Des Ruines et des Poèmes” (2019) and “Arbre de vie” (2021), Louis Arlette decided to claim it as his first. A rebirth. “Chrysalis” with slam and electro tones, mixes a taste for the antique and disillusioned modernity and tells the life of a young man not really in his time.
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Published
Reading time: 3 min
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We no longer say “it’s in the stores”, but the album Chrysalis by Louis Arlette has indeed been there since the beginning of the year. Nine songs which seem to have summoned Ferré, Murat, Daho or Radiohead as much as Bobby Lapointe, François Villon, Rabelais and Cervantes.
The cast is inspiring and literary. Chrysalis, songs and as many epics to the glory of antiquity, produced by his own label, Le Bruit Blanc. He talks about it as his first album, it’s perhaps the most personal.
Sinuous road
Louis Arlette’s musical path is as winding as the artist seems restless. Sound engineer, producer, composer, singer, comfortable on the keyboard and cello, with a solid musical and classical education in hand, for ten years, he has been lurking in the corners of French song.
If he worked with the group Air, Carla Bruni or Cat Power, his personal career and his four albums make him a romantic with elegant melodies and literary texts.
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In his career he sang Baudelaire, Villon, Ronsard and Musset without forgetting Gérard de Nerval. Previously, his production flirted with New Wave and electro-rock, this time, it is his voice and slam which are put forward of the sounds.
The reinforcement of the poets
Louis Arlette easily admits, this album was born from a low point. Secret moods, but a serious bout of the blues, he even says disgust, led him towards a refuge, a withdrawal with his only companion, writing. From this voluntary isolation were born nine titles.
He says : “I take back my story, I mean my story, my stories” in magnificent landscapes but “damaged by salt“, by time, as inscribed on the white marble of ancient temples. For it is Antiquity, that of Jupiter, Athena or Dido which currently dominates the lands of Louis Arlette.
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Who else but him would dare, in these times of high techno and Instagrammable music stars, to write a song about… Sardanapalus? You don’t know anything about this character, you’re not the only one!
In 3 minutes 34 seconds, Arlette recounts the epic tale of this paranoid and libertine emperor of Assyria, an excessive tyrant with a life of debauchery. The rhythm is throbbing and thrilling for a slam where Mesopotamia, Trajan’s column, the Achilles heel take you for a lesson in electro mythology.
A slam like a battle between Musset and Ronsard
For the release of his album, Louis Arlette declared: “It’s a pure jubilant pleasure, I like the consonants, I like when it sounds ticking, the alliterations, the repetitions”. This is where we think of Bobby Lapointe, talking to him about Flaubert’s “gueuloir”: “I only know that a sentence is good after having put it through my mouth”, said the writer and it could be the singer’s maxim.
When you listen, it rings, it hits, and it’s covered with elegant, sometimes oriental arrangements. “As Aeneas said to Dido, without end or beginning, but scraps placed end to end will result…” His story is a delight of wordplay without ever losing the groove. There the singer’s voice has changed, a metamorphosis. A chrysalis being this intermediate state between the caterpillar and the butterfly, obviously, Louis Arlette took care of his title of ancient nobility, of course.
Album: Louis Arlette “Chrysalis” at Le Bruit Blanc