Five years after “Confessions”, Philippe Katerine reactivates the eccentricities and zanies that he has established as major art for more than thirty years. On “Zouzou”, his eleventh album named after his dog released on November 8, the French singer draws up an existential assessment between fantasy and depth.
Fantasies, zanies, trivialities and absurdities still remain on the menu of Philippe Katerine's new songs. Always with these more romantic or melancholic pop counterpoints and these more introspective chiaroscuros which counterbalance his knowledge of clownish humor.
In this eleventh album “Zouzou” which bears the name of his dog, it is the mid-life crisis and a sort of existential assessment which are this time on the French singer's agenda. In seventeen short songs of beautiful and daring formal freedom, Katerine reactivates the eccentricities that he has established as major art since “Chinese Weddings” in 1991, but also deeper considerations on life, death and time flies.
From French melodies to electronic and autotuned hip-hop via piano ballads, more orchestrated pop, chamber soul, freewheeling saxophone or a Bach prelude, Katerine has no complexes about doing, singing and mix whatever comes to mind. To bare himself too, as notably in this hilarious dialogue with his elderly penis (“What are you becoming?”) or the walks of his fifty-year-old belly on the extraordinary “Nu” which brought joy to many and misfortune for some during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris this summer.
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Whimsical varnish and emotions
If the inspiration here is familial, domestic and existential despite the textual exuberances, the sound registers of “Zouzou” are extroverted and open to a world of sound hybridizations, with obviously, as often in Katerine's repertoire, more or less success.
It is in any case an eleventh album full of mischief and very playful language games, where Katerine even manages to invite on a single track an armada of current French-speaking singers (Angèle, Clara Luciani, Juliette Armanet or Zaho de Sagazan) thanks to his daughter's stunning imitations (“Edie's Song”).
But behind the fanciful veneer of his songs, the Vendéen also knows how to capture the spirit of the times which passes with clairvoyance, emotion and without too much derision by evoking, among other things, death (“Happy Birthday”, “Bonifacio”), friendship (“Chez Philou”) or memories (“Cinéma”). In the end, excess and modesty go hand in hand in “Zouzou”.
Olivier Horner
Philippe Katerine, “Zouzou” (Cinq7/Wagram Music). Released November 8, 2024.
France
Music
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