Mathieu Boogaerts

Boogaerts Is Back - With A Second Album!

13/10/1998 - 

Young French singer/songwriter Mathieu Boogaerts emerged on the music scene two years ago with an excellent début album entitled "Super". Boogaerts's light airy style and his mix of naïve poetry and childlike rhymes delighted critics and music fans alike. Indeed, following in the tradition of Murat, Miossec and Dominique A, Boogaerts's eccentric compositions have sent an original breath of fresh air rushing through the French music scene.

Boogaerts, who traces his roots back to Belgium (through his grandfather), grew up in the Paris suburbs, in Nogent-sur-Marne. Boogaerts was fascinated by music from an early age, and in his teenage years the young whizzkid constructed a makeshift studio in his parents' cellar. It was here in this secret 'laboratory', not far from the banks of the river Marne, that Boogaerts first began forging his distinctive minimalist pop sound. All of the tracks on Boogaerts's début album Super were recorded in this basement studio, but for his follow-up album J'en ai marre d'être deux, Boogaerts decided to fly out to the Tambourine Studios in Malmö (in the south of Sweden) to work with Tore Johanson - sound engineer to hip Swedish band The Cardigans.

Paradoxically, for an album recorded in such chilly climes, J'en ai marre d'être deux is bathed in an aura of warmth and sensuality. Boogaerts's new album features an unexpectedly fiery mix of influences, the singer's usual minimalist ballads fusing with frenetic bursts of samba and salsa beats. This time round, Boogaerts takes the listener on a magical musical Mystery tour all the way from the Comoro Islands to the West Indies - via New Orleans! What's more, the multi-talented Boogaerts plays nearly all the instruments on J'en ai marre d'être deux, with the exception of the elegant string and brass section (assured by a group of Tore's Swedish musician friends).
J'en ai marre d'être deux features a truly eclectic mix of styles, ranging from Sens - a catchy little samba song about love gone sour performed on a selection of toy instruments - to La bombe, a frenetic polka number which resonates with the force of a circus fanfare. Bill is a delightfully original attempt at acoustic techno, where the frantically punning lyrics threaten to spin out of alliterative control. But one of the outstanding tracks on the album is undoubtedly Boogaerts's minimalist version of Michael Jackson's Billy Jean (performed as a kind of Dylan/Dick Annegarn crossover!) We guarantee you'll never have heard anything quite like it before - and possibly never will again! With his delightfully naïve lyrics, his pastel ballads and his hallucinatory visions of Utopia, Mathieu Boogaerts can justly be described as a True Original.

Mathieu Boogaerts J'en ai marre d'être deux (Island France)

Gérard  Bar-David