Talamanca

After the release of Rommelpot in January this year, Antoine Loyer is back a mere six months later with another album; the singer-songwriter-guitarist teams up once again with Mégalodons malades on Talamanca, an idiosyncratic collection of tracks recorded between Brussels and a Catalonian church in the Spanish village from which the album takes its name.

The lyrics bring to mind the ramblings of a child's imagination run wild, which makes more sense when you find out that some of the lyrics were indeed written by schoolchildren, or inspired by the babblings of a baby (‘Percheron Frelichon’). That being said, the ones actually co-written by children are almost impossible to distinguish from those written exclusively by the musicians; the lyrics are whimsical, unburdened, and a little nonsensical.

Loyer's guitar is accompanied by piccolo, flute, contrabassoon and rommelpot (a Flemish-style friction drum). More disjointed musically than on some of his previous albums, it mirrors the lyrics with its own brand of quirky appeal, but it's sometimes a little hard to hold onto the train of thought, which is a shame as at times the music seems to be picking up momentum and is halted just as abruptly.

Talamanca is playful, experimental, and at times, just plain absurd. The album is an expression of musical freedom which pushes the chanson well out of its comfort zone.