Philippe Brach – Les gens qu’on aime

How was it necessary to sew all the fabrics making up this quilt? Philippe Brach has surely asked himself the question on more than one occasion, he had to give birth to a coherent whole. Three after the release of The Silence of the Herds, his masterpiece to date, it was imperative to offer a work that stands. And so he very possibly assessed the weight of the task and procrastinated on the assembly of this new opus, of which we feel the rigor and the great organization but also a paradoxical resistance to the excesses of such practices. 

We can understand it. No artist of this caliber wants to stick to a winning recipe, however winning and…. we also know that inspiration is a mysterious creature, moreover very difficult to harness when it presents itself.

Be that as it may, People We Love is the natural sequel to the ambitious project that preceded it. Several elements can be found there again, from the most ostentatious symphonic pop to the most elementary country-folk, from muscular rock to rural blues, from music for large orchestra or big band to intimate folk-jazz, the Quebec artist uses generous contrasts.

This dialectic is reflected even more in the literary approach, Brach knows how to circulate the energies between absurd humor and dazzling light, between ghosts and sweet words, between autumn sun and nuclear sky, between this somewhat strange reconstruction of the national anthem Canadian and the celestial wanderings of migratory birds, between colloquial language and chastened language.

We say it looks like him. That’s really what happened in his full head. That this stone is already cemented in its building. That we will assess the actual content over time.