Swinging piano, trumpet blowing blue ribbons, double bass playing cool tunes and nocturnal guitar with crystalline reflections, the title track of Émile Bilodeau’s new album opens the doors to a jazz bar. We don’t know where or when we are, but we guess even before he sings it that it’s the meeting place for those crippled by life or love, the refuge where they dream better while drowning their despair.
On this track, the singer plays the bartender, a disillusioned observer of a pitiful fauna, a role with which he is fed up, but which perhaps prevents him from finding himself in the place of one of his customers… He scrutinizes other slippages – social and political – on Love at the end of time, in which he plays a young father who tells his child about himself. Sings about a breakup in The sugar season (“Do you know that it hurts me/Since we’ve loved each other it hasn’t been the same”).
The tone is jazzy here, bluegrass there (The Daisys), the swing momentum is recurring, but what does not change is Émile Bilodeau. For better or for worse. He bites into these new songs as he did in his previous ones: with a crooked smile, a sometimes poorly polished patter and with this tone that lacks finish which makes him endearing, but also a bit irritating. His singing is spontaneous, yes, but his phrasing is often abrupt and poorly channeled.
We forget his limits as a performer when he serves texts where careful images rub shoulders with substantive poetry. In songs with weaker lyrics like the anecdotal Misunderstanding Or Bad weather, where he knits rather clumsily around the verb tenses as if it were a genius idea, it creaks quite a bit and it hangs in the corners. It’s better when he has the joyful criticism (You need what you need) or that he dialogues ironically with his heart (Compromise) to retro music.
At the bar of hopes offers good moments, is often musically elevated, but also suggests that after his sensational debut, Émile Bilodeau is perhaps slowing down the pace. Taking the time to let the artist that he is mature and the vision of the world – critical, caustic, tender or sloppy – that he already successfully shares could, we say, take him even further.
Extract of The Daisys
Song
At the bar of hopes
Émile Bilodeau
Bravo Music