Nicolas Michaux Releases Vitalisme LP Today via Capitane Records, Shares “Watching The Cars” Single + Video
Today, Belgian singer, songwriter and producer Nicolas Michaux is sharing his third full length album, Vitalisme, via Capitane Records. He is highlighting the track “Watching The Cars”.
“Watching The Cars,” the third song on the album, is a new wave-influenced song with an irresistible riff that plunges us into a Cassavetes-like atmosphere. The track is shared alongside a video, in which a man, locked in a motel, is forced, like a punished child in primary school, to write the same sentence over and over while the owner watches the war on television.
With a groove reminiscent of Talking Heads or Ian Dury, this waking nightmare has the makings of a hit, wonderfully capturing the dystopian ambiance of our current times and ready to wake the dead. The video accompanying the track is once again directed by Simon Vanrie and consists of a single continuous shot made with the help of motion control. The result is a dance between man and machine, questioning the increasingly coercive power of robots over humans.
Vitalisme consists of twelve recordings made over the years on the Danish island of Samsø and at the Free House, the studio of Capitane Records in Brussels. Much like in his previous album Amour Colère, Michaux navigates between polarities in Vitalisme: dawn and dusk, birth and destruction, hope and cold lucidity, past and future. However, this time it is less about exploring the different poles of human experience and more about bringing them together at a precise point where life unfolds. Armed with impeccable writing in both French and English, Michaux traverses the familiar lands of inspired songwriters, addressing grand themes of timeless poetry as well as the empirical realities of the contemporary world: love, illness, war, wisdom, resurrection; but also climate change and class war.
The album’s title, Vitalisme, is both solar and mysterious, chosen by Michaux in homage to Gilles Deleuze who wrote in Pourparlers. Recorded partly on the island of Samsø and partly at the Free House, Capitane Records’ studio in Brussels, Vitalisme, like Michaux’s previous albums, blends indie rock and French chanson, constantly rooted in a soundscape reminiscent of the warmth and freedom of 70s records. In an approach akin to Brazilian tropicalists, Michaux has always chosen the honesty of an artistic proposition that fuses his inherited culture and knowledge of French chanson with various “external” sources: early rock , Ghanaian highlife, new wave, to name a few.
Vitalisme is out today via Capitane Records.
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