PISSENLIT

Since the release of his previous album, “I bought a car,” says Antoine Corriveau. PISSENLIT is a “road album,” like you would refer to a “road movie.”

The seed of PISSENLIT, Corriveau’s fourth album and his first to be released via Secret City (which put out his Feu de forêt EP in November 2018) was thus planted at the end of Route 138, “during a writing residence in Natashquan. I drove up there by myself.” Crossing Quebec from the south to the north provoked “a reflection about the territory.”

The themes of movement and its opposite, taking root, became “a way to talk about myself through my vision of the Quebec territory, of how it’s inhabited, how it has been developed over the years, over generations.”

The gestation period of PISSENLIT was chaotic. “It reminded me of my twenties, when I was starting to make music by myself at home with GarageBand. I invited musicians to come to the studio, but without sending them the songs ahead of time. I didn’t want them to prepare themselves. I recorded many tracks, then cleaned things up, putting things together,” gradually composing and recording this album, which he entirely produced.

“I conceived this album as sort of a collage. I wanted it to be eclectic,” says Corriveau, who was partly inspired by Beck’s classic Odelay LP. “I love its free-for-all quality. I aimed for that kind of abrupt tonal shifts. Surprises, really.”

PISSENLIT doesn’t so much overturn Antoine Corriveau’s sound that it grows off it, in a quasi-punk, angular, unpredictable manner, free of the string and brass arrangements that had been following him since 2014’s Les Ombres Longues. His music is even free of his signature melancholia, in part at least (you can’t completely reinvent yourself!). This left room for something resembling humour, or certainly the fun of delivering spontaneous, lively, sometimes mischievous songs.