RISE & SHINE (vinyl)

Description

Boris Gronemberger is an essential figure on the Belgian music scene. A versatile musician for Girls In Hawaii, Françoiz Breut, and Castus, he has also been pursuing a recognized career as a singer-songwriter for twenty years. First under the name V.O, and for the past few years as River Into Lake, a new chapter in his long-term personal work. As with his predecessors, Boris composed and recorded this new album alone, between an isolated caravan in the Belgian Ardennes and a house on the outskirts of Brussels. Two havens, two refuges where he took the time to develop his music, after two previous albums had already established a universe of highly personal elegance, combining orchestral pop and refined electronica. From the introductory and presentational 'Be Confident', we find this musical signature: a choice of complex vocal harmonies, ethereal sounds mixed with more rock arrangements. As on Let The Beast Out (2019) and The Crossing (2020), the instrumentation on this record is abundant, both in its electronic and acoustic registers. Synthesizers and drum machines constantly combine with guitars, percussion, wind and string instruments, as on the highly catchy 'Beside You', the album's second track. This voraciousness of forms and materials could lead to saturation. But Boris, with the elegance of an enchanter, avoids the trap of excess, preferring to disorient, surprise, and charm us. We travel, from one part of this album to another, between synth-pop and ambient, repetitive rock and jazzy atmospheres within the songs themselves. This is exemplified by 'Drawing Cards', the album's melodic tour de force, or 'Don't Drive into the Tree', a sublime pop ballad whose initial form and writing, after developing, explode mid-flight in an electronic and noisy flurry, concluding in a spectral atmosphere, amidst sounds of birds and barking. While the orchestral aspect remains a common thread throughout these new songs, the atmospheric influences are more prominent, the rhythmic textures more abstract, and the production more synthetic. Less effervescent than before, Boris's music seems calmer, more accomplished, and thus more direct. Certain choices, particularly the vocal placement, are more assertive ('Let Me Watch TV', an electronic ballad reminiscent of vocoded Lambchop à la 'Flotus'). One sometimes thinks of Robert Wyatt for the vocal harmonies that punctuate this album, of Talk Talk, of course, whose Colour of Spring appears to be a crucial influence. But also of Grizzly Bear, Efterklang, or Sufjan Stevens; all artists who, like Boris, create polycephalic pop. In their own way, River Into Lake's music works through disruption, layering and multiplying its canvases, between acoustic sources and electronic magma, classy songwriting and sound experimentation. Without being a concept album, Rise & Shine is nonetheless a manifesto of coherence and demonstrates the importance of the whole, of the convex narrative one can expect from an ambitious pop album. It is also, and above all, a small miracle of refined writing, a bedside album that should be explored in its entirety to be delicately, giddily led to peaks of ingenuity and beauty.