Say Laura - Vinyle 180 Gr

Description

Eric Chenaux plays guitar and sings. Songs that he writes and improvises live, in equal measure. Always radiant songs, and just as fractured, meaning perfectly unpredictable and therefore exciting, unfailingly. For the imagination, intelligence, and heart that Eric Chenaux, a crooner to the first degree, a theorist to the fourteenth, and a tightrope guitarist, simultaneously expands and oxygenates. Say Laura, his seventh album, is being released on the Canadian label Constellation in co-production for the first time with the French label Murailles Music. It is perhaps his clearest, most limpid, most immediately poignant record. An album as sparingly equipped as usual: falsetto, six strings treated like a tiny drunken orchestra, and that mysterious little battery of pedals eccentrically connected to each other and played like an amphibious piano. Cyril Harrison recorded, mixed, designed the spherical stereo, and adjusted the reverb until it sounded as if from inside an egg. Say Laura, the album, meanders from its opening on the languid back of a simulated bass, giving the invertebrate pulse of the title and the entire record, upon which Eric relentlessly kneads his adventurous melodies, twisting his collection of elastic bands in every direction without ever breaking any of them. Say Laura features only five songs, which flow long and freely over their intertwining, five songs like five small streams that restart and refresh themselves as they advance, horizontal and curved, and that flow into each other and mix because it is natural and joyful. We are comfortable there, swaying, drifting in the gentle sun, in the moonlight, we don't know exactly. These five songs can be listened to like very tenderly crushed vocal jazz standards; you don't always know when they begin or when they end. They groove, crookedly, in slow motion, but how they groove. And then we dream, we have the time.