Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)

Album review

On his third album as Christine and the Queens—but also using the new moniker Redcar—the artist now known simply as Chris isn't pushing boundaries so much as flying over them. "My journey with gender has always been tumultuous. It's raging right now, as I'm just exploring what is beyond this," he said in a May 2022 interview, around the time he announced his adoption of masculine pronouns. "A way to express it could be switching between they and she. I kind of want to tear down that system that made us label genders in such a strict way … I think the answer is to be flickery, fluid, escaping." That's also a pretty good description of his music, which is equally, and charmingly, hard to pin down. Opener "Ma bien aimée bye bye" finds Chris, as Redcar, adopting a chanteur's pose against the late-night cabaret sounds of slinky guitars and shimmering high-hat. Sung in a seamless mélange of French and English, it's a seductive goodbye but still, it's "my life till I die." (It completely fits Chris's estimation of the Redcar personality, which he has also called a "poetic and philosophical construction"—a very Bowie thing to say—as "suave and sophisticated.") While the last Christine and the Queens album leaned heavily into hard-edged '90s funk, here there are more references to the crisp-heavy bottom beats of Shannon-style '80s dance pop, especially on "la chanson du chevalier"—remarkable for its ethereally circling round-robin vocals, ranging from high and sweet ("the man I love") to a richer lead and sharp back-up—and Grace Jones-esque industrial rhythms. "Tu sais ce qu'il me faut" adopts Jones' unique binary of wild and controlled, while "Les âmes amantes" sounds like it's from another planet: liquid and layered. There's also dancefloor euphoria ("Looking for love"), powerful synth-heavy moments ("Les étoiles," aka the stars), airy sweetness ("rien dire") and an Annie Lennox cool breeze ("la clairefontaine"). A groovy eight-and-a-half-minute epic, "Combien de temps" samples electropop pioneer Gina X. "Je te vois enfin" sets up an intriguing mystery: "Oh-oh, my father I believe they have sinned," the lyrics translate to English. "It's impossible in your books not to sin." But Chris—Redcar—is perhaps most revealing on "Mémoire des ailes." The song is so clean and hymn-like, it sounds sacred, with vocals that completely envelop even as the music edgily stutters and shudders. "I'll teach you a game, I'll teach ya," he sings, at once a promise and a tease. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz