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Because | genius.com |
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Héloïse Letissier is bored with binaries.
Why confine yourself to your native tongue if idioms from another better meet your needs?
Why restrict yourself to the syntax of only one gender when another is ripe with alternate vocabulary?
Why not a little of both?
This iconoclastic attitude begot an audacious design: a sprawling double album of lean, glimmering funk where the second half translates the first from heavily-accented English to altogether more colourful French. Drawing inspiration from both the velveteen venery of Janet Jackson and the kinetic crackle of her brother Michael, Letissier guides herself along the same tightly syncopated gridlines — staccato clusters of stressed syllables puncture through a neon glow to the rubbery ricochet of vulcanised basslines. But the precision of the arrangements belies the messiness of the arranger. Chris is an unapologetically complex self-portrait of a woman swelling with romance and bursting with lust, often both at once.
So Letissier smoulders like some improbably sultry teen idol, a rakish cowlick flopping boyishly over her dewy forehead. “Some of us just had to fight for even being looked at right,” she keens on bittersweet highlight ‘Five Dollars,’ a far cry from her warmer, kinder debut album: “can’t help it if we’re tilted.” On Chris, her sophomore release, Letissier is no longer afraid of confrontation.
She takes midnight strolls for the thrill of getting bruised and beaten. She recalls playground taunts and steaming lovers in exquisite detail. She steals shards of sunlight, and the very same same afternoon kicks back to casually chug a can of fizz.
Album opener ‘Comme si on s’aimait’ (‘As if we were in love’) lays out Letissier’s philosopy in explicit terms:
“I am done with belonging”
There are few musicians on the charts who can boast such prodigious fluency in both French and English, in both masc and femme, in whatever way suits them. Instead of simply choosing one, each is slickly articulated with with idioms from the other, meshed together into a seamless expression of self-love and self-care.
Chris flexes with rock-solid confidence. Letissier knows her music is twice as good as anyone else’s.