Since his first hit, Then we dance, Stromae plays contrasts masterfully. Those of a magic formula associating festive swayings and dark texts. Those also opposing his obsession with mastery to the whirlwinds of an era and a psyche. This is more than ever the case with Multitudethird album awaited for nine years, whose event release has been meticulously organized, thanks to a marketing creativity capable, for example, of scenography, on January 9, in a “sung” interview at TF1’s “20 heures” intimate chaos depression (mentioned in the title Hell).
The figure of the laboratory worker or the professor controlling image, music and words to the millimeter has often been used by Paul Van Haver, alias Stromae, to the point of stylizing its form until the digitization of an avatar – used in his clips or on stage – at the same time wacky, surreal and a bit chilling, as the half-breed son of Tintin, Magritte and nWave Pictures (Belgian Pixar). Musically, the obsessive home studio handyman has become a high-flying cosmetic surgeon, capable of grafting a mosaic of references with clinical precision as well as warm efficiency. Opening the door to reminiscences of the travels with which his Flemish mother had enriched him, this son of a Rwandan father had thus tropicalized his triumphant second album, Square rootCongolese rumba, Cape Verdean cavaquinho or Jamaican setbacks.
Funny opposite, “It’s only happiness” repaints parental angelism in the colors of “vomit” and “poo”
The cultural “multitude” has expanded even further in a new record which, if anchored in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, also sails through the East, Central Europe and Asia. Sometimes assisted by American producer Moon Willis, the singer-musician (stylist, graphic designer, director, etc.) builds a frame for each piece on which the bodies can dance, carried away by the sensuality of cumbia, forro, rumba, bailecito … Intertwine with a sharp sense of the gimmick, electronic sounds and refined instrumental presence. The charango, this kind of Andean ukulele, plays a major role in it (Health, Hell, This is happiness, Bad day…), but the learned traveler is not afraid to slip the erhu – a Chinese violin – onto African soil (La Solassitude), to twirl the ney – a Turkish flute – away from the Bosphorus (Not really) nor to trap its swaying cadences with polyphonic strangeness. A way to continue to charm while intriguing, in phase with the more disturbing universe of the texts.
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