Eric Chenaux

Say Laura’ is Eric Chenaux’s seventh album on the Canadian label Constellation (co-produced for the first time with the French label Murailles Music). It is perhaps his clearest, most limpid, most immediately poignant record. A record as sparsely equipped as usual: lead vocals, six strings treated like a tiny drunken orchestra + this mysterious little battery of eccentrically linked pedals played like an amphibious piano, to ensure hallucinations and to make the lanterns seem like planets. It is sparsely equipped but more pictorially organised than ever within a moving and airy architecture, where the colours mewl in the felt when each shot is fired without warning and without a defined objective, like so many sleepy and dreamy rockets, slow, so slow, and luminous. It was Cyril Harrison who recorded, mixed, designed the spherical stereo and adjusted the reverb until it sounded as if from inside an egg.

Eric Chenaux does the best rock n’ roll without playing any of it. The most staggering, dazed, funny and beautiful guitars undulate over the skinny beat of the short-circuited pedals while in the honey-ginger vocals love songs with holes renew love, renew the hole.