Selective Listening | Alexandre Désilets, Daria Colonna and Lary Kidd

Every week, our music journalists add songs to the playlist of The Press on Spotify. Here are three recent titles that are in our selection.

Alexandre Désilets, Everything is perfect

Three years after the album happy peopleAlexandre Désilets continues to distill his refined pop in a new EP, Dead End Garden – a brilliant play on words, which well sums up the view that the Quebec singer-songwriter has on the world. We find in these four songs that he co-produced with Jean-François Beaudet his unstoppable sense of melody, his taste for rich and dense arrangements, and also his exceptional agile and airy voice, which places him in a league of his own. The song Everything is perfect is a true pop gem that we’ll be humming after just two listens, while the dark lyrics – “ It’s so beautiful / Behind bars / From my golden cage / I’ll never come out” – create an interesting effect of depth.

Josée Lapointe, The Press

Daria Colonna, Comfortable

In the mouth of Daria Colonna, melancholy suddenly becomes the coolest state. Even “surrounded by the puppets of the night”, with in her gut “the fear of speaking, of blushing”, the writer and now singer manages to stare down her ghosts with the fragile arrogance of one who knows that she will end up having the upper hand . Poisonous and lascivious, vulnerable and insolent, cozy and rough; his second career song, Comfortable, combines 1990s trip-hop with the sadness of a woman who knows that “no one has ever recovered from love”. The author of the unforgettable collection Don’t shame your century (Poètes de bush, 2017) has clearly lost none of his chic for exquisite titles: his first album, to be released in the spring, will be entitled The Requiem of the Drunk Sirens.

Dominic Tardif, The Press

Larry Kidd, Do you know my name

Mobb Deep enthusiasts will recognize the sounds of birds opening Do you know my name and will not be destabilized by the beat lugubrious then the disastrous words which follow. Produced by Ajust, Ruffsound and Kable Beatz, the second extract from Lary Kidd’s next album, expected in the spring, is a convincing demonstration of the Quebec MC’s talent as a verbal painter. “Is it a coincidence that my age is the price of a kilo / I should have become a bricklayer / Fuck the philosophy books,” he raps. Another coincidence: the song was recorded after returning from a tour in France with Loud last spring, and the two artists, as well as Lost, Imposs, Raccoon, Rymz, Souldia and Ya Cetidon, are preparing to give a show at The Olympia in Paris, February 8. Note also that Lary Kidd will be at the Foufounes Électriques, on June 13 and 14, as part of the Francos.

Pascal LeBlanc, The Press