Where the discreet demigod, sometimes tangled in his own stature, rises to his best in the strange lightness of his finest songs.
It is in 2022 and in the troughs of the Crab with Human Pinchers (let us charitable forget The Blue Algae, the fairly mediocre album of 2024) that we must seek the roots of what I Don’t Want To has at its best: his songs. If this respectable record, threaded with airy visions, seemed then here and there patched up by more conventional tracks pulling toward a Cabrelian variety, moustache-less, it is precisely on this terrain that Manset 2026 convinces the most.
First, with three humble successes opening. The earthy blues – thick yet airy – of Little Prince, between Neil Young and Murat, then the pop song As a Mother Goes Away, with clear echoes of Magical Mystery Tour. Most of all, listening to at least two times The Blue Cedar, with its confounding naïve poetry, is to guarantee spending the day humming its carousel-like melody. One might then think here of Manset’s Blue Petroleum (2008), the ultimate album of a Bashung to whom he had, among other things, given the immense Like a Lego.
Craftsmanship
But the hidden monarch must stumble over the rug of his ego: here comes the title track and its indulgent lengths (more than eleven minutes)… A way of sprawling that our self-satisfied demigod relaunches at the end with the dispensable endless talk-over But Who Do You Think We Are? In spite of this hauteur to which one sometimes has difficulty believing, if I Don’t Want To will ultimately remain an admirable album of an interpreter, it is still thanks to the songs that continue (up to the finale Love Has Said) to form its solid backbone.
The centerpiece of this new collection, and an evident sequel to Like a Lego, Sometimes It Is Enough (a true masterpiece, with arrangements in the vein of Automatic for the People (1992) by R.E.M.) even lets him make it the most beautiful Manset since Manitoba No Longer Responds (2008) – which opened precisely with Like a Lego. With its gypsy touches (A butterfly was flying) or flamenco (Sometimes It Is Enough, again), I Don’t Want To also testifies to an ambivalent relationship with the world, between distrust and awe: “If you knew the world/its power, its infamy” are the words that open the record. An ambivalence that reflects ours in facing this imposing and burdensome figure, whom we will not be able to put away as long as he continues to deliver, here, a craftsmanship of such rare beauty.
I Don’t Want To (Verycords/Warner Music France). Release on April 3.
