Review Summary: Ce matin, je veux la solitude
As befitting all its drenching in psychedelic, freak folk atmosphere, for all the tablas and tambourines, fingerpicked guitars and electric drones, Catherine Ribeiro’s debut with 2 Bis (who would later adopt the name 2 Alpes) is simultaneously expansive and introspective, exploratory and reigned into the tropes of psychedelic folk music, while stretching those tropes to their limits.
The more out-there tendencies of Ribeiro’s debut are illustrated by the bizarre, manic delivery of Les Fées Carabosses, Ribeiro sounding like Edith Piaf on a cocktail of uppers, bold, defiant and ringing with brazen laughter. Followup Voyage 1 drops much of the folk influence in favor of pure ego melting psychedelia, thumping tablas and a violin noodling in the background as a reversed drum track backs Catherine’s falsetto wailing. Whether this is all going to be treated as an overindulgent mess, or a very pure immediate emotional expression is going to depend very much on the mindset of the listener. If that tendency towards psychedelic indulgence is something that can be easily forgiven or even embraced, there’s going to be a lot here to love, as all the minimally structured expressionist tendencies of the whole thing become an almost overwhelming experience. While the instrumentals are, for the most part very much a backing for Catherine’s vocal acrobatics, their seemingly unstructured, improvisatory qualities make them less a backing band than a Greek chorus, punctuating and sustaining all the shouted poetry and whispered longing.
Whatever its amorphous, improvisatory qualities, the steel spine of the album is the brassy, sensuous vocal stylings of Ribeiro herself. So far removed from the inviting vulnerability of Francoise Hardy or the cool, languid artsiness of Brigitte Fontaine, Ribeiro’s voice is unrestrained, dynamic, an unleashed force that is at turns a seductive, breathy croon and brazen, shouted laughter. Stability and poise are far from the defining features of Ribeiro’s vocal performance, as often in the same song the quality of her voice leaps from that of a lullaby
chanté doucement to a defiant shout into the wind. Everything is an expressionist whirlwind sustaining whatever Ribeiro is feeling in the moment.
The impression left by Catherine Ribeiro’s debut with 2 Bis is of an almost violent rejection of conventionality, a reactionary use of the sounds of pastoral music against the stultifying and conventional. Like much of the music of this era, it’s dated and in places, bordering on grating. But I came away from the album with the sense that here was an uncompromising statement by an artist who refused to be lured by the commercial possibilities of pop appeal, an easy move given her history as a somewhat popular actress of the
nouvelle vague scene. So if the enjoyability of + 2 Bis is sometimes a little obscure in spite of all the obvious talent of its main voice, at no point does it stop being admirable.
