(Because Music)
A howl of despair sublimated into beautiful experimental pop, the artist’s fourth album is his best yet
When Christine and the Queens first appeared in the anglophone world in 2015, the name was an alias for Héloïse Letissier: a French artist with an extraordinary line in immaculately cool, obliquely catchy, 80s-flavoured synthpop that mused on queer identity. By 2018, Letissier had become Chris – the eponymous, androgynous protagonist of her funky second album. Then, last year, the musician announced he was now using male pronouns as well as another moniker: Redcar, also the title character of his third album, Redcar les Adorables Étoiles.
That record, a reflective, slippery, not-quite-satisfying collection sung in French, was met with a muted reception. Now it seems simply a warmup for this masterpiece. Letissier’s clearly rocky path to self-realisation has been entangled with seismic grief – in 2019, his mother died – and Paranoïa, Angels, True Love is a howl of despair sublimated into astonishingly beautiful experimental pop, drenched in warm celestial light, punctured by spikes of confused pain. On Tears Can Be So Soft, loss is bluntly aired – “I miss my mama at night” – over a syncopated raindrops-on-the-roof beat and a minuscule snippet of Marvin Gaye. A distorted “fucking” is bellowed over sweet Johann Pachelbel strings on Full of Life. True Love couches romance in inescapable grief (“make me forget my mother”), the sound of a heart monitor and blasts of static.
Continue reading...by Rachel Aroesti via Electronic music | The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment