The title of Viviane Audet’s latest album, The Nights Advance Like Trucks Over Girls, is striking. So is the content of the work. But in all the pain that the artist addresses, she infuses such a great dose of beauty that the whole thing can be listened to on a loop. We are touched and we want more. The album’s opening song, La Botanique, deals with domestic violence. The title of the album had warned us and we enter directly into the heart of the matter. Here, Viviane Audet addresses the emancipation of a person who manages to escape from a toxic relationship. “Thou shalt drink no more from my eyes,” she says in her sweet voice, magnified by lovely cello and harp arrangements.
In addition to the seven songs, the album is punctuated by three instrumental piano pieces. If the interruptions of the genre sometimes break the rhythm, these moments of extreme sweetness, which respond to each other over the course of the disc, are more than welcome on this disc. The themes of the album scratch us and, from time to time, we are balm with these pieces, entitled Anthèses 1, 2 and 3.
Sambal Olek, nicely written and more groovy, interrupts a slower rhythm that only the title track had changed before. The latter is also a perfect antithesis, between its difficult theme and its fast tempo. Whistleblower, feminist, calling for resistance, the piece is accompanied by a music video, shot by documentary filmmaker Sarah Baril Gaudet, which is worth the detour.
Penultimate song (not counting the last Anthesis), announcing the end with piano chords, You Can Fall is strikingly splendid, the piece that we will listen to most often. “It won’t do you any good not to exist / We’re dead longer than we’re alive anyway”, intimates Viviane Audet, on this piece where she asks this “you” who becomes a loved one to take her hand. “You can fall, I’ve got you,” she sings on the beautiful chorus of this beauty-filled record.
