LA (vinyl)

Description

Antoine Bellanger tunes his pessimism to his gala keyboards, and his French lyrics spare no one, starting with himself. Antoine Bellanger is Gratuit and "Là" is his third album. Antoine has also played with Mein Sohn William, Belone Quartet, Le Feu... "Là" is a post-Greek tragedy. There is the actor, alone, a little distant, planted squarely in the middle of a party, and the omniscient chorus, which narrates, comments, and suggests ideal reactions. Unlike ancient tragedies, in "Là," the same person plays both roles. She endures and analyzes. She takes everything head-on and she steps back. And as in real life, everything gets tangled, draws near, chokes. Psychology assails sociology, reason encroaches on madness. Because one can bellow with love while uttering words of hatred and regret it the next day, because one can hide one's dementia under coherent discourse, because one can tell true lies. "Là" is a story of tangled and complex dualities. Form is associated with content. We get lost in a cocktail of organic and synthetic sounds that overlap and hide. In the background, a noisy, confused party unfolds, the kind that makes you want to shout the most intimate things into your interlocutor's ear, things that, in any case, will be drowned out by the crowd and forgotten in the night. "Là" is a catharsis for Gratuit, who bares himself, head held high, kneeling in the mud. "We see these same people, when they have resorted to melodies that transport the soul out of itself, restored as if they had taken a remedy and a purgation." Aristotle, Politics.