The Girls In Hawaii singer escapes alone on “Vattetot”, nine songs in French. Beautiful and intimate.
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@ Antoine Wielemans
“I had been doing band music for seventeen years and hadn’t taken the time to create outside of Girls In Hawaii. I wanted to write songs at my own pace and find myself in a confrontation with myself. ” It was after the recording of “Nocturne”, the last Girls In Hawaii album, that Antoine Wielemans began to draft his idea for a solo project. His new responsibilities as a father, confinement, the eternal questions (“What am I going to do when Girls In Hawaii ceases to exist?”), His ears cradled in his teenage years of indie rock but more open today to the French-speaking world of Bertrand Belin or Albin de la Simone form the breeding ground for this first solo album.
A disc that bears the name of a rural town in Normandy bordering on the cliffs. “I stayed there twice, living as a hermit, without a Wi-Fi connection. Writing in French, finding new sounds on my laptop or on the piano rather than the guitar, it allowed me to get used to my voice again and to go beyond the stage of modesty. It was a laying bare.”
Rich in nine minimalist songs where the electro points the tip of its nose at the right time (the loop à la Nils Frahm on De l’or, the call to let go on the end ofBlanche), “Vattetot” has the merit of moving away from the indie-pop universe of Girls. Antoine plunges into the mise en abyme (the prettyPoetry on the pleasure of giving birth to a song), evokes death (Cell), solitary therapies (Dog, Here), the relationship to nature (End of summer), the aftermath of drunkenness (Brussels who captures “this moment that announces a hangover and the fact that you will stay the next day at the bottom of your bed”).
If “Vattetot” is a personal, melancholy and often dark record, its author recognizes that the midlife crisis also leaves its mark on it. “I became a father when I was forty. Lots of happiness of course, but also a putting into perspective and the end of the concept of total freedom. As for other 40-year-olds that I know, the confinement and all that it has aroused as immobility has reinforced this feeling of “aging”. But, like with Les Girls, if my writing is dark on this solo project, it is always counterbalanced by light arrangements.”
The 4/2. Botanique, Brussels. The 10/2. Reflektor, Liège.
