“I lied”, by Damso, a new dance album with Angèle, Kalash and Kalash Criminel

All day on November 7, Damso invited his fans to listen to his new album, I liedat the headquarters of the French Communist Party, in Paris. Every hour, a hundred of them, each more stylish than the last, handed over their cell phones to hostesses, who locked them in a pouch. Under the dome of the building, you can listen to the eleven songs using headphones. A week earlier, journalists were invited to a recording studio on 20^e district where the American producer Pharrell Williams lives.

The rapper has put in the resources to promote his album, recorded in Brussels. He invites three artists, Angèle, Kalash and Kalash Criminel, with whom he has already collaborated, and repeats the experience brilliantly. He first brings his colleague of Congolese origin, like him, Kalash Criminel, to discuss in their language, Lingala, and on fashionable South African electro, amapiano. With, as a bonus, the whistles of street dance groups from Soweto (South Africa) and a religious choir in the background: a first hit.

Absolute male

Follows a guitar-vocal track boosted with sub-bass, with the sweet Angèle in the role of his lover with whom he tries to put the pieces back together and to whom he confesses, honest and clumsy: “I won't tell you twice, I only have eyes for you, but that won't make me a faithful man. » With the Martinican Kalash, he drives the point home on the substance and the form to Alphawhere they loudly proclaim their absolute male status. There, their deep voices venture into shatta, music born in Fort-de-France, a subgenre of dancehall.

From the introductory piece, Chrome, in the end, Damsautistewhere he brings together African percussion, a string section and techno, the Belgian rapper excels in the exercise of style, without ever focusing too much on being coherent, one rhyme leading to another, sometimes in a arbitrary. Thus, in the refrain of Chromewhere he discusses the black activists Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Thomas Sankara, he repeats: “Nigga, there's no respect, nigga, there's no respect/ Like the one who waits to get ken to say she has an STD. » Too bad if the rhyme falls like a hair on the soup, assuming its crass, macho absurdity… But, as the pieces in the form of confidences confirm Consequences et Damsautistewhere he claims to have Asperger's – another lie, he was never diagnosed as such – nothing is simple in Damso's head.