A visual journey that feels increasingly dreamy with every frame it presents us with, the music video for Sébastien Lacombe’s new track “My Thousand Dollar Car” is every bit the encapsulation of identity a lead single should be. There’s a sense of exposure that bleeds from the lyricism into the imagery here and doesn’t leave us alone for the duration of the video’s running time, and similarly, most everything on the new album Fly tends to have a very unsheltered honesty that has become all too uncommon in western pop/rock and folk music the same in recent years.
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There’s a very mellow feel to the vocal harmonies we encounter in “My Thousand Dollar Car” and much of the tracklist comprising Fly – from the slow-rolling title cut to more experimental numbers like the stirring “Mr. Suicide Man,” the fragile “I Am Who I Am” and provocative “Gold in Your Soul,” this feeling serves as one of the greatest agents of evocation in this LP’s bigger picture. Nothing comes to us saturated in pop polish nor aggressiveness in either execution or stylization, making darkly witty – but structurally complicated – tunes like “When the Devil Rides With Me” all the more impressive to hear in this setting.
“Rise,” “So You Say,” “Every Man Needs Loving” and the aforementioned “My Thousand Dollar Car” have a rather poppy framework in comparison to “Mr. Suicide Man” or even “Gold in Your Soul,” but every stitch of material on this album is bound together by Lacombe’s unfiltered emotionality. He’s never halfhearted in the statements he makes behind the microphone nor through the strings, keys and fleeting percussion that backs him up in Fly, and I can only hope to say as much for some of the other records slated to debut out of the Canadian underground this autumn.
APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/us/album/fly/1500940570
Sébastien Lacombe hasn’t met his creative peak just yet, but this latest incarnation of his sound is absolutely among the leanest and most heartfelt I’ve heard out of any player in his scene recently. Fly doesn’t try to wow us with a lot of fireworks in the fretwork or hybridity in its harmonies; it instead relies on Lacombe’s natural abilities and the rustic vibes his songwriting style can yield when it’s pushed in the right direction, and for my money, it adds up to being one of the more interesting and provocative albums I’ve reviewed in a while.
Kim Muncie