Review of The People We Love, by Philippe Brach | Brach all spit

We launch the first track of the album, the title track. The voice of the singer-songwriter greets us: “The people we love are all going to die. The sentence is followed by a burst of laughter. A superb instrumental introduction follows, refined but engaging. The table is set. (Re)welcome to Philippe Brach.

We find on this fourth disc by Brach a rocking melancholy, a certain nihilism, an indomitable chaos, and this dark humor which still manages to surprise us, even if the singer-songwriter has always had this tendency to mix tragedy and the comic.

Philippe Brach is sometimes very literal, accompanying his words with the sounds that translate them. On the magnificent Suns of Autumn, the phrase “I dive into the noise” announces an orchestral and dramatic roll, like… a dip into the noise. The track is also a perfect example of how the artist packed his album, instrumentally speaking: the beginning is a conversation between vocals and the dominant bass, the brass band then drops in for cinematic effect, then the acoustic guitar brings the piece completely elsewhere, a transition that finally gives way to a slow conclusion to brass and electric guitar. That’s a lot for one song. But it works.

It works throughout the disc because Philippe Brach does not only experiment according to a delirium without a precise goal. Each piece has its own direction, none is like the next. However, everything seems to have been shaped from the same clay, the coherence never fails. Everything indicates that the artist was bubbling with a thousand ideas that demanded to see the light of day and that he skillfully assembled on this heterogeneous record, co-produced with Gabriel Desjardins (La Controverse).

More pop than all the others, Révolution (the song), almost childlike in its rhythm, ends… with the sounds of Philippe Brach drowning, before the music simply resumes. If you thought you had come across the most accessible track on the album, the singer kept the right to surprise you again, to remove all pop aspiration from his own song.

And while we are barely recovering from hearing the singer suffocate in the water, the piece Ôk Canada begins. A cover of the Canadian national anthem, sulphurous version, sung with a delicacy that can only give the impression that we are witnessing a great moment of sarcasm.

Half an hour after hearing Brach tell us that “the people we love are all going to die”, it ends with Good night, instrumental piece. We have the impression of having been shaken in all directions, then brought back to good port, with the desire to return as soon as possible to this strange merry-go-round.