Album review

Benjamin Biolay

Trash Yéyé

04/10/2007 - 

Slipping a new Benjamin Biolay album into your CD-player is a bit like going to Creuse for the weekend. You know it’s going to be beautiful, but it risks being a bit monotonous too! Biolay’s fourth offering, Trash Yéyé, is very much in keeping with his album output to date. Think impressively rich compositions and arrangements shot through with moody French songwriting!

There’s no doubt about it, Benjamin Biolay is a genius when it comes to making a strength of his weaknesses. Hence his half-whispered, half-spoken vocals that could barely be called singing! Biolay compensates fans for any failings in this department, however, wrapping his songs in multiple layers of music and meaning. His lyric-writing is nothing short of brilliant. Indeed, Biolay ranks as one of the rare French songwriters on the current scene capable of stretching his mother tongue to its limits. His linguistic acrobatics make clever use of resonance and repetition while at other times he reduces words to almost pre-verbal sounds as he plunges listeners into the heady spiral of love.

Whipping up the perfect cocktail - one third dark, moody musing, one third raw, tortured emotion, one third lost illusions - Biolay infuses almost all his songs with refined lyrical masochism. And apart from the obvious single choice, Dans la Merco Benz, his new album contains a host of other ‘pop-chanson’ gems such as Bien avant and La garçonnière. Biolay’s songs are semi-cinematic scenarios, conjuring up black-and-white images of endless nights in smoky bars, drinking to drown your sorrows. Not your only trivial personal sorrows, of course. Biolay specialises in a much more noble type of melancholy, indulging in an emotional soul-searching more akin to Baudelaire’s famous ‘spleen’.

Meanwhile, Biolay the 21st-century romantic couches his lyrics in the most texturally sophisticated arrangements, conjuring up ethereal choirs on Douloureux Dedans and sumptuous orchestrations on Cactus Concerto. At times, on tracks such as Regarder la lumière and Laisse aboyer les chiens, Biolay deliberately leadens his music to give his own vocals more of a light, aerial edge.

After two years’ painstaking labour (and fifty-seven new songs in the bag), Biolay can pride himself on having produced an extraordinarily rich and intense album. But Trash Yéyé is such a dark and tortured work that, once again, Biolay will no doubt reap more critical acclaim than commercial success. Let’s just hope that one day young Monsieur Biolay will evolve from rave reviews to popular mainstream success!

Benjamin Biolay Trash Yéyé (Virgin/EMI) 2007
Currently on tour in France

Ludovic  Basque

Translation : Julie  Street