Houdini

Description

As its title seems to suggest, *Houdini* is an escape. And its creator, Maxime Dobosz, at the helm of San Carol, is a master of escape. San Carol's first album, *La Main Invisible* in 2013, was a wonderfully freaky electro DIY effort, while his 2015 *Humain Trop Humain* offered us a masterpiece of taut rock. This album emanated from the concert halls of our provincial adolescences spent dreaming too high, knowing we'd hit our heads on the ceiling. But San Carol is stubborn, and it opened a breach. Air escapes towards a vast sky, and the sound blossoms, allowing *Houdini* to usher in a procession of unexpected influences that reinvent cool. From Todd Rundgren to Elton John, a languid lyricism flourishes like a corolla on the fertile ground of rhythms more complex than they appear. Still brilliantly supported by the faithful Nerlov (VedeTT) on bass and joined on the controls by Raphaël D'Hervez (Pégase), Maxime Dobosz here predominantly reworks the guitars with the help of Stw to make them sound like synths. Again and again, San Carol takes one of the many aspects of pop to invest its mutant potential and shift its boundaries. While Maxime's new songs already have the patina of classics, they hijack the synthetic and inject novelty into his journey, as in the songwriting, which becomes more personal and discreetly political, where joyful melancholy transcends the bitterness of frustrations.