Dany Placard – Placard (Top Albums 2024)

Fifteenth album for this young veteran of the left-hand lanes of indie kebamericana. Written during a dark period in his life when his girlfriend had returned to Acadia and his dog Stormy was doing her last lap, the Saguenay native tried to reach deep inside himself to find a spark in the darkness. For, as he sings in the lovely Les fleurs dans cour, “the moon illuminates, but it doesn’t warm”.

Driven by his woodland energy, his gruff wilderness voice and his assertive joual, Placard rediscovers the soul of a trucker listening to Johnny Cash and Neil Young while bored of his belle on Route 66. But it’s in the streets of the Rosemont district that he lives out his reveries as a more or less skinned lone wanderer.

“With my mouth wide open, I swallow black flies, but I don’t give a damn,” he says in the title track. It’s the perfect line to describe this disillusioned man who, despite the pitfalls, keeps his feet firmly on the ground in his life as a more or less marginal musician, who is probably looking forward to his fifties with a certain circumspection.

The result is an intimate album that sublimates the apparent banality of everyday life with catchy country-folk ritornellos, punctuated by lapsteel, harmonica, fiddle, saxophone and trumpet.

After the psychedelic rock explorations of the previous opus, it’s time for raw emotions, for unpolished words simmering in a highly sophisticated orchestral mixture.