Aile-P

Description

It sometimes takes a flight of birds seen one morning in the blue sky to regain hope and courage in the face of a darkened world. With a flap of wings, here is Zazie back at the assault of musical peaks. Seen from the sky, her "Aile-P," a collection of eight light and serious tracks at the same time, four more than those on her first "EP," resembles a flying object that one can identify with. Nervous electro tracks like "Let it shine" to soar, enter a trance, "fly in the feathers" of a reality that too often makes us want to bury our heads in the sand. Delicate songs like "Gravité" to walk, like a tightrope walker, on the thin line of emotion, between sweetness and resignation.
With "Aile-P," released four years after "Essenciel," a platinum-certified album, Zazie defies the laws of weightlessness and rises even higher. Always in search of the right word, the one that will make her fragile heart beat and do justice to our humanity, she has the gift, like Souchon, of summarizing in a familiar or poetic expression the vibration of an era. "Gravity, we can avoid it," "Humanity, rise up, stand up, lift yourself up!" "It's stupid, when is it" are all mantras hiding beneath their playful whimsy slogans that hit the mark and bring people together.
However, a new vulnerability has colonized, like virgin vine covering the gray-green facade of a house, Zazie's playful writing. This is because in the meantime, the COVID crisis and the lockdown have come and gone, forcing the artist, always through hills and valleys, into solitary introspection. "During this time," she recounts, "I allowed myself the right to think differently, to go a little further on certain subjects. Even to cry, without being overly depressed, taking advantage of the fact that I no longer had a TV show and therefore no obligation to be presentable. I found this time for oneself interesting, with this sudden right to laziness, to sadness, and to envision oneself with honesty."
Nothing serious, then. But offering herself to us without artifice, she conceived this album, in collaboration with Edith Fambuena, her accomplice since her ninth album "Encore heureux," as a sort of musical purity. "The idea, with Edith, who co-directs with me, was to be less talkative musically." And autonomous in their way of working, with few musicians, but carefully selected, in a chosen self-sufficiency tinged with sisterhood (and brotherhood: her brother, Phil Baron, composed two tracks). A method comparable to that applied to her hair, now silver: removing unnecessary layers to let the light emerge. And understanding that it takes little to move: a piano-voice balancing act on the moving "C'est con c'est quand," a song about the lack of love and the misunderstandings that lead straight to intolerance and xenophobia; a tangle intertwining pop-rock guitar riffs and haunting rhythms on the surprising "Gilles"; or this hypnotic way of hammering words that Zazie has on "Lève-toi."
Sometimes two chords are enough to set the atmosphere, both contemplative and enraged with optimism, of this "Aile-P," where behind every word a poignant sincerity surfaces. Like in the manifesto song "Couleur," written in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the police violence that led, across the Atlantic, to the death of George Floyd and the permanent paralysis of Jacob Blake. "I am black, white, I am the color / Of hope, and white, and black, and in my heart / I am Floyd, Blake, flames watching over the dead / So that all colors shine again," she sings, fist raised.
Melancholic and committed, but always whimsical and eager to let go, Zazie, like the cover that curiously shows her perched between sky and earth, sheltering from a blue sky under a holey umbrella. Always attentive to surf on the clouds and contemplate the flight of birds, but comically realistic about her own powers, basely earthly, to change the world. A duality found in the sumptuous "Ça commence," which opens this "Aile-P," a humorous account of the ups and downs of an artist's life that oscillates between packed venues and ecstatic concerts and great moments of solitude in disproportionately luxurious hotel rooms. Or in "Gilles," where the character of the song, like someone with Tourette's syndrome, unravels a string of insults with a certain elegance. Because yes, when Zazie loses her cool, she still manages to turn lead into gold. A graceful privilege of those who never forget to look up, where a flight of swallows or starlings, indifferent to our trivial condition as mortals, passes by dreaming.