Polnareff gives birth «At last! - A tale of frustration

Le Regard Libre N° 46 - Jonas Follonier

Twenty-eight years was not enough time for the great French melodist to perfect the masterpiece he promised his fans. His previous album, Kâmâ-Sutrâ (1990), will undoubtedly remain his last great success, including the nugget Goodbye Marylou. Perhaps it's precisely because he dawdled too much in the studio, first ideas often being the best. In any case, there's a lot of good stuff on this new album. opus, entitled Finally!. We've decided to take a closer look at each of the eleven tracks on the album, which may give us a better understanding of what makes Michel Polnareff such a genius and what makes him so ridiculous: his eternal excess.

This is the biggest disappointment of the year, the decade, or even the century for this magazine—I’d been looking forward to Michel Polnareff’s new album so much and had been pestering my colleagues with his music. Some had even come to share my admiration and anticipation. But we have to face the facts: whether you listen to this new opus which no one believed in anymore—whether with the ears of a connoisseur or those of a young layman, Finally! Overall, it didn't live up to the expectations people had for it… or rather, the expectations that no longer existed. 

The saga of an album that has been postponed time and time again

The thing is, we'd been waiting for this album for quite a while. Just imagine: as far back as 1996, six years after Kâmâ-Sutrâ, Polnareff says he's working on new songs. However, only one album live was released that year—and it was excellent, by the way—, Live at the Roxy. This experience was repeated during his two major comebacks on stage in France in 2007 and 2016. Throughout this period, three studio tracks were still released, such as singles: I dream of a world (1999), a rather successful, epic gospel-style film marking the transition to the second millennium, and Ophélie Caught in Bed (2005) as well as The Man in Red (2015), which we'll come back to later, since they've been reworked for the new album.

Read also | Polnarevolutions

This new album has been announced on several occasions—either by his agent, his record labels, the media, or Michel Polnareff himself. But the release has been postponed every time. Michel had tours to prepare for, an autobiography to write, and a life as a father to lead. The funniest—and most touching—excuse he came up with was the one he shared on the April 30, 2016, episode of «On n’est pas couché»: «The song The Man in Red »It moved me so deeply that I had a hard time pulling myself out of it." Philippe Manœuvre, former editor-in-chief of Rock 'n' Folk, had even gone so far as to tell me during our interview published last January that Polnareff didn't feel comfortable releasing his album in the wake of the Bataclan attacks.

In any case, there has always been something about Michel Polnareff that suggests a certain isolation, and it seems to have gotten worse. There is a empire of confinement. Already isolated by his tinted glasses with white frames, he shut himself away for eight hundred days at the Royaume Monceau luxury hotel while writing Kâmâ-Sutrâ, the actor who plays Letter to France has since become so immersed in his public persona that it borders on the extreme. After proclaiming himself «the Admiral,» the artist maintains an almost mystical relationship with his fans, the «ship’s boys,» with whom he converses directly on social media. Through tweets, Polnareff geek Did he kill the beatnick – and the «picnic», that of The Fly and Love with you —the one we loved so much? There’s certainly a little bit of all that, yes. The avant-garde character Polnareff has been modernized; in that sense, the artist has perhaps become a little outdated.

An inconsistent and over-the-top album—for better or for worse

Fortunately, Polnareff hasn’t exactly been sitting idle for nearly three decades. The proof is that the album has been released, and this quirky guy’s creative madness is still very much alive—perhaps more than ever. The two downsides are that his musical inspiration doesn’t really come through in the lyrics, and that the very American production results in a hyper-baroque, even bloated, work. In Finally!, the music ranges from disco to pop rock, with elements of funk, brass band, and ballads. Finally!, which its creator likes to compare to his cult classic album Polnareff's (1971), considered by many to be his masterpiece, is as eclectic as can be. Here is our song-by-song analysis:

1. Phantom: The album opens with what is undoubtedly its greatest achievement. An instrumental…

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Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com

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