It is not humility that stifles Xavier Dufour Thériault’s alter ego, Zoo Baby. “We can go out and drink Tsingtao / lie on the ground below the ships / and listen to my record”, he proposes in All Night Longnot Lionel Richie’s song, but the one with which he opens his elegant second album.
In February 2020, the singer of Gasoline launched a first solo album as something about him is revealed, in his case, a bow to pop. A love that rockers have since equated with their own sound on Gasoline IIIwhich was looking at the end of 2021 on the disco side.
Amusing, of course, the homonymous Zoo Baby nevertheless presented the limits inherent in a parallel project, quite the opposite of this Volume 2, on which the tender troublemaker finds his true identity for good, outside his group. With All Night Long, Each home And different from youDufour Thériault releases his most exhilarating series of three songs since the assault (Summer Debris (Elsewhere), Fire, These people who dance) which inaugurated the first Gasoline in 2014.
By becoming in turn a Hochelaguian crooner, a repentant heartbreaker and a sad boy ghosted by his flame, the new Xavier shows that he is now well instructed in the charms of nuance. And this is how he whispers his lyrics of humidity and loneliness on the majority of the eleven pieces, while strings fly behind him which give each of his crooked smiles a kind of melancholy that also suits him. although, once, his leather jacket.
The broke dandy is also now well educated in the benefits of introspection and signs texts in which insolence almost gives way to spleen or difficult confessions (Desire, on jealousy in friendship). Clearly written during the pandemic, the album eschews old ideas on this theme and speaks of the distance forced by confinement as fuel for the desire that swells between two people.
Superbly directed by Julien Mineau, Volume 2 borrows again from Prince (the guitars of Take time), to the Gainsbourian song as well as to the baroque pop of the time when the English rock groups had allowed themselves to be tempted by the splendours of vast orchestral arrangements. What do you want to press repeat and to decapsulate another Tsingtao.
baroque-pop
Volume 2
Zoo Baby
duprince