“Spirales” reveals swaths of the life of the Provins-born artist who navigates time and space with a dense, abundant texture and a tremulous sensitivity. A major work, like a Modiano.
One day, in 2019 along the Loire, Dominique A shared the stage and long hours of complicity with Mark Long, from The Opposition, whom he had admired as a teenager. Beyond the shifts (the voice is no longer the same), the moment possessed something so perfectly right that it would not be repeated, even though the desire had been expressed.
That is at least what Mark recounts, one of the most beautiful and lucid songs of the fifteenth album—dense and complex—by the Provins-born artist who has since become a Nantes resident. “If I forget a day like that, I’ll forget everything,” says the lyric, which here specifies one of the autobiographical strands of these Spirales: to examine a few sentinels placed along the path of a life, and around them the lines of escape that radiate.
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
It is first and foremost this way of telling one’s story that, after Le Monde réel (2022) and its anxious contemporary meditations, gives the record its diary-like charm where the personal dissolves into the universal, almost as with Phoebe Bridgers and her newly released Lost Weekend. The same Mark speaks of “those unreal moments when time unravels its rings.”
The spirals of the title might be hiding here: circles of time that open up to unfold into furrows we traverse, drawing closer to or drifting away from an axis that is sometimes very precise, sometimes elusive — La Brique orange and its vertiginous poetic blur. And so Dominique A’s narration, an explorer of epiphanies, approaches that of Patrick Modiano, whom we know as a reader.
If he follows the opening (La Roue du jardin Garnier), a wrapping return to his childhood in Provins, from the single Un jour j’ai disparu, a tale of severing ties with his origins, it is to come back at the end of the album to this disappearance with a variation (Évanoui) offering on the same theme a more radical angle. This subjective diffraction gives the whole its double quality of evanescence and density — in harshness as in softness.
Go Listen to Picasso y los Simios
Where La Musique (2009) perfectly synthesized the minimalist and lyrical poles of Dominique, Spirales almost moves in the opposite direction: Sébastien Boisseau’s bass lays down a plush carpet on which the electric guitar (making a grand return here) becomes reticent, echoing the conflicted times of Remué (1999), while melodies drift in and out at the shimmering pace of water.
Glimmers, lights and reflections stay the central concern: it is the clarity that takes shape around a loving expectation (Apparaître sur le quai), and it is also La Claire Obscurité of the closing track (and its ultimate, obviously polysemantic question: “How to resist?”), after the beautiful swell of Silence des autres.
As the record turns, one finds oneself digging into Dominique Ané’s life as if one were drilling into one’s own memories—and going to listen to Picasso y los Simios, a Nantes-based group that has remained relatively obscure, lending its name to a track of unadorned nostalgia.
Autocentered yet far from being self-absorbed, Spirales also captures the world’s unsettled moods and tensions, notably through the quietly relentless Bromure, whose gentle violence avenges us from the sinister domination of invasive septuagenarians who feed on suffering.
From the “Music to Twist Time”
That single is so eloquent that it leads further to Coltan (an stormy charge against the deleterious paradoxes of our connected addictions), more anecdotal, amid impressionistic streams of consciousness such as Longueville.
At times, the approach comes close to that of Pascal Bouaziz (Mendelson), even in the grating confession of Shining at 12. Nervy, this song is bristling with guitars, like those that pierce at its center a peaceful 39 rue Sainte-Croix (where the phrase “music to twist time” appears), which touches the sublime once you penetrate its troubling fog of memory.
Dominique A (perhaps more than ever here) is a songwriter who demands all the attention that true listening entails, a gesture that only pays off if the material justifies it. Or, as an unofficial but self-avowed heir to Bashung (especially the 2002 era with L’Imprudence) as well as to Mark Hollis, his art opens the doors to an entire world.
A cosmos in which to wander, even at the risk of getting lost to better find oneself: “I did not understand this country / Yet I love to return there so much,” he sings while traversing La Rue des Flandres. We could say the same about the inexhaustible inner country traced by these Spirales.
Spirales (Cinq7/Wagram). Release on October 9. On a French tour and at La Cigale, Paris, on March 24, 2027.
