CAMILLE - OUÏ

Every new album by Camille Dalmais is a triumph for the new wave of French songwriting: from her 2002 solo debut to the revelation of "Le Fil", an album arranged entirely a cappella, in recent years the talented French vocalist had sought an international path with English-language songs in a folk-pop style (somewhere between Björk and Mariam Wallentin), sacrificing some of her dizzying wordplay and vocal experimentation along the way.

With the brief "OUÏ", there finally comes an almost total return to her mother tongue, the inspiration behind all of Camille's most brilliant flights of fancy: nursery rhymes, tongue-twisters ("Lasso"), rhymes built on rhythms of popular derivation ("Les Loups") are the essential tools she uses to launch into further breathless, vertiginous vocal climbs.

Où va l'eau, où va l'âme et la sève et les larmes éva-nou-ies (nous oui)

Aller où, aller là, hallelujah, aller où il est ou-i lui

(“Fontaine de lait”)

Camille's childlike spirit (and timbre) relives its springtime in these recordings made in a medieval-era monastery in Avignon, although the overdubs and percussive elements ultimately qualify “OUÏ” as a classic studio work.

Camille once again plays at building polyphonies with herself, exploiting the cadence and phonetic contrasts of syllables to construct foundations reminiscent of the primitivist babbling of Meredith Monk (“Langue”), over which she can then further split into other, more delicate or more acidic “selves” – a range that stretches as far as the grotesque rattle of Diamanda Galás (“Twix”).

“Je ne mâche pas mes mots”: words run free and breathe life into the (lost?) art of the chanson, a persistent seduction that – especially in cases like this one – transcends its geographic and cultural borders to win over anyone who lends it an ear.

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13/06/2017