The Nuc plus ultra: St Vincent the Texane and Neil Young the return

Seventh album already for the American artist who continues to be largely underestimated in our region. In the United States, the Texan has already been amply rewarded for her work. Here, we continue to perceive her as a strange, even disturbing singer, and that is regrettable. Although it is quite difficult to access, this new disc is indeed a great success. After collaborating with Jack Antonoff, the star producer of Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey, St Vincent, aka Annie Clark, decided not to seek the help of a director when recording his new titles. And she did well. The young forty-year-old continues to experiment with sound textures. This time, she remembered the grunge and industrial movements of the 1990s. We think as much of Nevermind's Nirvana as of Nine Inch Nails' masterpiece, The Downward Spiral. From these founding records, the accomplished musician retained the science of sound arrangement.

An uncompromising album, which confirms that the niece of guitarist Tuck Andress (of the duo Tuck and Patti) is not about to sell her soul to the devil of commerce. Quite radical, the record borrows from the lexicon of alternative rock, synthetic pop, funk and new wave. The climates are cold and oppressive, squeaky and dislocated, with nods to film music (noir, the film) and the screaming guitars of the group Garbage. A true virtuoso, St Vincent is one of the rare women to have a guitar model in her name. She does not need to highlight her feminism to assert her artistic strength. Listening to this cathartic record is salutary and likely to give hope to the most desperate.

Since his last studio album, World Record, released at the end of 2022, Neil Young has returned to concerts. After the strange but endearing album Before and After, which included the menu of acoustic concerts given the following summer, Neil Young reunites with his faithful group since 1968, Crazy Horse as part of a new electric stampede. If Before and After focused on covering the entire long career of the Canadian-American, Fu**in'Up focuses on one album only: the excellent Ragged Glory, released in 1990. A year before the bomb Nevermind , Neil Young became the godfather of grunge with this furious record, full of distortion and heroic improvisations. Those who only see him as a good-natured hippie still haven't gotten over it. As part of a private party for the birthday of one of his friends, the septuagenarian decided to revisit the record, more than three decades after its release. And the result is damn good. Not only is the group still as sharp as ever, which benefits from the presence of Nils Lofgren on piano and Micah Nelson on second guitar, but Neil Young is in dazzling form. Some of the songs, which all have new titles (a decision as strange as their author) are delivered in even more furious versions, notably the title song. As he approaches 80, Young continues to be a teenager having fun making a racket, and that's good. This record bodes well for the electric tour which has just started in North America, and which, unfortunately, has not been announced on our old continent.