We launch the first track of the album, the title track. The voice of the singer-songwriter welcomes us: “The people we love are all going to die. The sentence is followed by a burst of laughter. A superb instrumental introduction follows, refined but engaging. The table is set. (Re)welcome to Philippe Brach.
We find on this fourth disc by Brach a rocking melancholy, a certain nihilism, an indomitable chaos, and this black humor which still manages to surprise us, even if the singer-songwriter has always had this tendency to mix the tragic and the comic.
Philippe Brach is sometimes very literal, accompanying his words with the sounds that translate them. On the magnificent autumn suns, the phrase “I dive into the noise” announces an orchestral and dramatic rolling, like… a dive into the noise. The track is also a perfect example of how the artist loaded his album, instrumentally speaking: the beginning is a conversation between the voice and the predominant bass, the brass band then returns for a cinematic effect, then the acoustic guitar brings the piece completely elsewhere, a transition that finally gives way to a slow conclusion to brass and electric guitar. That’s a lot for one song. But it works.
It works throughout the disc because Philippe Brach does not only experiment according to a delirium without a precise goal. Each piece has its own direction, none is like the next. However, everything seems to have been shaped from the same clay, the coherence never fails. Everything indicates that the artist was bubbling with a thousand ideas that demanded to see the light of day and that he skillfully assembled on this heterogeneous record, co-produced with Gabriel Desjardins (La Controverse).
Philippe Brach’s universe is unique and identifiable, this album is no exception. A particularity of this new disc, however: if Brach knows very well how to fill his songs with verbose and well-crafted verses, here he left a lot of space between the lyrics.
More pop than all the others, Revolution (the song), an ear verse almost childish in its rhythm, ends… with the sounds of Philippe Brach drowning, before the music simply resumes. If you thought you had come across the most accessible track on the album, the singer kept the right to surprise you again, to remove all pop aspiration from his own song.
And while we are barely recovering from hearing the singer suffocate in the water, the room Ok Canada begins. A cover of the Canadian national anthem, sulphurous version, sung with a delicacy that can only give the impression that we are witnessing a great moment of sarcasm.
Half an hour after hearing Brach tell us that “the people we love are all going to die”, it ends with Good night, instrumental piece. We have the impression of having been shaken in all directions, then brought back to good port, with the desire to return as soon as possible to this strange merry-go-round.
folklore
The people we love
Philippe Brach
Fawn House