Burning Lines

Description

In 2023, Julii Sharp and her EP Toucan left us ecstatic, in the cottony serenity of her soothing weightless ballads. Great expectations therefore preceded this first album, Burning Line. And the first listen defies all expectations. Between these two records, the earth burned. Julii Sharp's life, and that of her musicians, marked by a series of painful events, came to a halt. The music too, an inevitable fallow. For a year, everything stopped: rehearsals, writing, concerts... We had to wait, not for the pain to pass, but for it to transform, to make its journey. And when everyone was ready, the group tuned in, united as never before around a single goal: to revive the embers on a still-warm field of ashes. Burning Line was then able to explode. In this eruption, there was no watchword other than to follow the group's instinct, which was also that of survival. The album was recorded live, by Olivier Cussac, in an urgency that ran through each member. This incandescence is immediately heard, as in the opening track where the electric detonations quickly take their place and announce the sparkling color of a long cathartic outpouring. They will punctuate the entire album with their raw energy, often playing on the contrast with the crystalline sweetness of the voice. Where Toucan had the attributes of a solo record, Burning Line is no longer the first album of a singer, but that of a band, in total cohesion around her. Each musician invests the sound space as an outlet, as a protected sanctuary where nothing can reach them anymore. If the album emerged in a context of impossible pain, it first strikes with its visceral energy, a communicative fervor. As if it had to ward off death. And it also knows how to let the light shine through tracks where lightness takes over, in the lyrics (Paris, and its gentle acoustic arpeggios, evoking an ephemeral love encounter) as in the music (the celestial Rainbow, whose ascent soars to the clouds and seems capable of moving unsuspected resources of hope). Without design or strategy, the album sweeps away French in favor of lyrics solely in English, which summon the ghosts of the past (Pirate in the Room, Boots You Once Wore) while claiming a necessary rebirth (Chrysalis, emblematic rock firebrand). That of the life to come or the music being created. The album is then heard as a cry, which perhaps first addresses all those who will not be able to hear it. And if it defies all expectations, it is to better transcend them.