Cédrik St-Onge Condenses the Verre Bouteille

On the evening of January 23, amidst the buzz of Le Verre Bouteille, I waited to see Cédrik St-Onge’s recent album, Osoyoos, performed live. Thanks to an extra date added to his December 5 launch – and which landed far away – I was able to attend, having missed the first event. I was really looking forward to it and wondered how the album’s lush, grandiose sound would translate to this small venue.

Unsurprisingly, the stage is packed: the singer-songwriter is joined by Marc-Antoine Beaudoin and Bruno St-Laurent, his bandmates from Vendôme, as well as Alexis Leroy-Pleshoyano (Mada Mada), Jérémie Essiambre (La Faune, Cosmophone), Flavie Melançon and Marilyse San James. It’s hard to see them all at once when you’re at the back of the room, so you identify them by the sound of their instruments. After 20 minutes, you can maybe make out the drummer between the heads, another 20 and a glimpse of the keyboardist’s nose. Maybe. Like I say, it’s packed.

The show begins, and what’s immediately striking about the first track, Un jour à la fois, is its immediacy. Even the softer moments are channelled into higher energy than on the album. Which makes you look forward to the highlights. Next comes Ce qu’on veut pas entendre, which confirms what the previous song suggested to me. The great contrasts in volume on this track make it one of the most bewitching. Barely ten minutes after it starts, I’m thinking in my head that this concert is already a success.

At one point between songs, St-Onge asks the crowd to shout out his grandmother’s name so he can record a video for her. Naturally, we get carried away, and here we are in an impromptu number where everyone sings « Josette » to the tune of “olé, olé olé olé…”. The musicians, like true professionals, join in. A little 15-second madness. A fleeting pleasure for the evening.

Back to the music. The songs are all delightfully reinvigorated, animated by a sensitivity between the musicians, an energy highway. The combination is solid: the backing vocals are hauntingly right; the guitar playing is precise when it needs to be; the drummer takes the liberty of playing with the rhythms, adding details and new punches that provoke joyful shouts. For all these reasons and others I couldn’t name, the live experience of this album was particularly different from listening to the standard material. The songs Ce qu’on veut pas entendre and Headlights are particularly well rendered, and the memory of their live version will tint all my future listening. For an album with rich, grandiose instrumentations, the small stage at Le Verre Bouteille proved surprisingly more than adequate to do it justice.

Maybe it was the proximity of the artists on stage. Maybe it was the fact that this was my first concert of 2024 and that I was in a positive mood at the idea of once again running between shows of artists I enjoy. No matter, this warmly coloured album was an affront to the cold outside, probably much more so this time than in early December. Not much more evocative, in this case, than the windows dripping with condensation you notice on your way out. Osoyoos and its creators were a delightful ball of warmth on my January 23 evening.