The Chaux-de-Fonier group Cinq delivers a first album full of color and hip-hop emotion. In “Tear of Sky Blue” released on October 25, the quartet offers its vision of cloud rap, i.e. hypnotic hip-hop with slower and more aerial musical structures.
In the vein of what French-speaking groups like Odezenne or Glauque offer, minus the licentious dimension, Cinq shows in the ten tracks of its first album a penchant for poetic narration, enveloped by very careful sound textures and all hypnotic curves which combine hip-hop rhythms, pop melodies and autotune.
The French-speaking group composed of two MC’s, a drummer and a keyboard thus indicates that these “Sky blue tears” are those which allow us to escape from rage and sadness to arrive in a more serene space.
Mathieu Palomo, one of the two voices of the group, recounts in the Vertigo show on November 11 the genesis of Cinq: “We met at the gym through another group called République Atypical which made a mixture of bad taste funk and rap. The Cinq project was born from a desire to move towards something more cloud trap, with a centralization on intimate texts and a different aesthetic identity.
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Metaphorical lexicon and emotional colors
Two years of gestation were necessary for “Tear of Sky Blue”: “We isolated ourselves in the mountains, in the countryside, and we got lost in the meanders of Paris to immerse ourselves in different contexts, with a desire to weave a coherent common thread through each of the titles to reflect a raw emotion. Each piece has its own identity, an emotional color,” explains Mathieu Palomo.
In “Tear of sky blue color”, produced in part by Jean Hook who has worked among others with the Haitian singer and rapper Wyclef Jean and the Kenyan rapper Muthoni Drummer Queen, the themes are very introspective and melancholy to evoke in particular relational difficulties. And Mathieu Palomo and his accomplice Thomas Richard, the other MC of Cinq, share the thematic texts.
“With Thomas, we made a list of themes that touched us respectively and we tried to weave a coherent common thread around them, with recurring figures and metaphors that oscillate between the infinitely large and the infinitely small,” explains Mathieu Palomo.
But no fragmentation between the musicians and the MC’s within Cinq, where the development of pieces full of references to colors, light, the cosmos or nature is done together in an organic way. A metaphorical lexicon that allows Cinq to evoke moments of calm and inner storms that are perfectly synthesized by the title “Blue Sky” which brings about a transition from darkness to light.
Olivier Horner
Five, “Sky Blue Tear” (Irascible Music). Released October 25, 2024.
In concert at Le Singe, Bienne, November 22, 2024; Nouveau Monde, Fribourg, December 7, 2024.
