It’s a dense, demanding album. Perhaps this is where both its imperfection and its beauty reside. We can’t listen the Circus of Consolation in a row. The leitmotifs abound. Which thread to take? Already, there is this electro-pop stretched to envy while, paradoxically, everything stems from an intimate poetry. We already knew this propensity of Léonie Pernet – “Voice of a half-blood child with a discordant heart”, does she seem to define herself on the track It’s raining Men – to widen the field to say the “deep self” abused or blessed by others. The producer and multi-instrumentalist introduces, once more, according to the sound layers, some experiments, motifs from elsewhere. Like those gnawa percussions on the songs of Maldoror, title borrowed from the collection of poems by Isidore Ducasse – Count of Lautréamont – where souls have a perfume. “Prose as an infinite treasure”, sings Léonie Pernet. Or this form of afro-electro that arises when listening toBackwards.
The musician, supported by Jean-Sylvain Le Gouic, ex-half of the Rennes duo Juveniles, sprinkles, on dark forms and bordering on melancholy, subtle grains of sand of joy. Thereby, the Circus of Consolation takes on bright colors that touch without mingling with each other. As if it were the formula of the emotions and the afflictions that the singer evokes: grief, regret, mourning, etc. This second album made to cry and laugh is in the right line of Crave, his first obsessions delivered three years ago, and where we were already dancing in spaces all so dense, on a sadness devoid of pity and carried by various influences.
A second album of imperfect beauty therefore. But aren’t imperfect beauties the salvation of the start of the decade? A time when we seek to create overdone metaverse to escape the organic and its rugged substances … Another striking element when listening to the lyrics of this bewitching album that we would like to repel: water. It flows, often as a token of reverie or contemplation, according to the words of the eleven songs: “My love, you drink too much, watch your dreams take water”, «It’s a burning rain», “In the water of unfinished dreams”, “The water of dreams rises”, “It’s raining Men”, “His body in the river will carry us away”. And between the rivers, conductors of a certain hope, there are territories which form “A collective utopia, a land of consolatory asylum”, definition that Léonie Pernet brings to this album. No wonder, then, that she composed the music for H24, this Arte fiction which accounts for violence once morest women. This soundtrack also calls for consolation, for relief by the word, therefore by the voice. And, above all, to the building of comforting territories thanks to their imperfect lines.
