When entering the studio to record Avec pas d’casque’s sixth album, Stéphane Lafleur had only one suggestion to make to his colleagues: “I want a homogeneous album. No shouting. An album with an atmosphere, which can be listened to from start to finish as if it were a single, long song.” The goal is achieved: here is the reassuring, cajoling Cardinal, to the ten songs that are already familiar to us at first listen. A benevolent album, woven with folk and pop, adorned with slide guitar and piano, which suspends time when you listen to it – at least that’s what the group hopes.
Joël Vaudreuil, drummer for Avec pas d’casque, estimates that it can take him “four to ten years” to complete an animated film like his Adam is slowly changing presented in theaters at the beginning of the summer, a year after its world premiere at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival.
“I remember that Joel started his film before I started Vikingand he finished it afterwards,” says musician-filmmaker (like Joël) Stéphane Lafleur, who estimates that the production of a film, once the writing is finished, takes about a year and a half, which tends to prove that an Avec pas d’casque album takes longer to make than a feature film.
The observation brings a smile to the four musicians gathered in the backyard of the En sol mineur music center in Rouyn-Noranda, where Avec pas d’casque premiered its new songs last weekend. Eight years have passed since the album’s release Special effects and those of the films of Lafleur and Vaudreuil, with whom Nicolas Moussette (bassist, guitarist, editor) and Mathieu Charbonneau (keyboardist, horn player, composer of the music of Viking with Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux).
Always
“Time flies,” says Stéphane Lafleur. “It’s a lot of talk on the album,” he reveals, thinking for example of the lyrics of Shoresat the end of the album. “I don’t have a problem with getting older, but I still find that it goes quickly. Several lyrics talk about trying to slow it all down and find a balance.”
The deceleration of the course of life attempted by Avec pas d’casque thus reaches its stopping time on Shores. Upright piano notes bathed in echo in the opening, country guitar chords, bass line that rocks: “Our hands, our hands full of things / To do / Head above water of the ordinary / And the light is so beautiful when it crosses your face”, sings Lafleur softly, making us enjoy these spiritual verses that we seek when discovering new songs from Avec pas d’casque.
Nicolas, Joël and Mathieu are the first to discover Stéphane’s texts. They too shudder when they discover his good flashes : “For my part, it’s when he sings ‘Our mothers, our fathers on our shoulders’ that it touches me,” confides Mathieu. Joël also has his own phrase, taken from the same Shores : “I hate myself for believing / That you will always be there.”
“We’re reaching that age group where we’re starting to lose people around us,” summarizes Stéphane Lafleur. Close ones, “but also icons,” adds Joël. “People you thought were invincible. Seeing them fall is like a reality checkeven though they are not close. I remember when Lemmy [Kilmister]from Motörhead, has died [en décembre 2015]. Old armor! I thought it would never die!” For Lafleur, it was the death in 2017 of Gord Downie that shook him: “His solo work touched me more than the music of the Tragically Hip. This guy had a voice, a pen, an aura, an incredible charisma on stage.”
Folk lullabies
Avec pas d’casque unpacked his ten new songs in front of the audience of the Festival de musique émergente en Abitibi-Témiscamingue last weekend. They hit the mark. The laughter that accompanies the first verses ofAccepting the mystery. The calm of the rowboat Getting out of the partywhere Lafleur sings about “Needing a break / Too much noise to undo / Too many daggers in the back”, the guitar coated by the sound of an organ, and with the same pastoral atmosphere, the chorus of More messages will followevidently found in a broken-down subway car, while the band was saying that there was “a chapter missing in the book” of the new album.
Stéphane Lafleur discovered that Let’s Flambé attracted great reactions from the public. The same can be said of the short film hidden in Cardinal. A brilliant, illustrated story, lasting three minutes and twenty-nine seconds and composed during a creative residency in Gaspésie. It’s called Something and it begins like this: “Gunshot in the night / Someone is moving / Someone wants something dead / Something wild / Something free, freer than him.”
We’ll let you discover the rest, in the most rocking of Avec pas d’casque albums, whose sound is far removed from its rough country-folk beginnings. “It seems like I understand better the place we occupy in the musical landscape,” comments Lafleur. “I understand better what we do, and what I want to share. The ways to surprise yourself or the audience no longer need to be spectacular, it can simply be in the successful purification of a text. That’s where I try to surprise myself.”
These songs, the fruit of five or six years of inspiration, were tested in front of fans at the Verre Bouteille bar on Mont-Royal Avenue last fall, just before entering the studio. “The goal was to practice our tunes to know them well before recording and to break them in front of the crowd, just to see the reactions,” explains Nicolas Moussette. “That guided us during the recording.”
As for Cardinal, which gives its title to the album, “it’s almost the synopsis of the album. It evokes a feeling of…” Stéphane searches for his words. “You have to motivate yourself every day anyway to stay optimistic,” he says. I want to be, I want to be one of the optimists, but it’s a daily job. Because, when you open the newspaper, optimism is not what’s on the front page. It’s what the song and the album evoke.”