Burning Lines

Description

In 2023, Julii Sharp and her EP Toucan had left us ecstatic, in the cottony serenity of its 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 has burned. Julii Sharp’s life, and that of her musicians, marked by a series of painful events, was put on hold. Music too, an inevitable fallow period. For a year, everything stopped: rehearsals, writing, concerts… We had to wait, not for the grief to pass, but for it to transform, to make its journey. And when everyone was ready, the band got in sync, united as never before around the same goal, that of rekindling the embers on a field of ashes still warm. Burning Line could then explode. In this outpouring, there is no guiding principle other than following the band’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 audible, as in the opening track where electric blasts quickly take their place and set the tone for a sparkling long cathartic outpouring. They punctuate the entire album with their raw energy, often playing on the contrast with the crystalline softness 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 sonic 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 is first striking for its energy, visceral, a contagious fervor. As if it had to ward off death. And it also knows how to let the light through frankly in tracks where lightness takes over, in the lyrics (Paris, and its gentle acoustic arpeggios, evoking an ephemeral romantic encounter) as in the music (the celestial Rainbow whose rise soars into the clouds and seems capable of moving unsuspected reserves of hope). Without design or strategy, the album wipes the slate clean of French in favor of lyrics entirely in English, which summon the ghosts of the past (Pirate in the Room, Boots You Once Wore) while claiming a necessary rebirth (Chrysalis, an emblematic rock scorcher). The rebirth of life to come or of the music being created. The album is then listened to like a cry, perhaps addressed first to all the people who will not be able to hear it. And if it defies all expectations, it is to better transcend them.