Glow

Album review

Waves of sweetness, starting with the beautiful photograph on the cover of this third album from this young blonde woman, Alice Matthew alias Alice Phoebe Lou. Through these twelve compositions, the South African explores her feelings in an intimate world tinged with melancholy and nostalgia, not so far from the lascivious and nonchalant nursery rhymes of a Mac DeMarco, as on the seductive introductory piece, Only When I or on the airy Lonely Crowd. On the song that gives its title to the album, Glow, one also thinks of the solo explorations of a John Frusciante... There are many different echoes that make the listener want to follow this terribly independent Alice Phoebe Lou (she has been self-publishing since her first album). She never ceases to attract attention, including that of a certain Paul McCartney, whose song Deep Deep Feeling she covered on 10 December 2020 as part of the '12 Days of Paul' campaign organised to launch the latter's new album. In a chaotic world, Phoebe Lou's music appears as a welcome cocoon, taking us with rare elegance into another space-time where the languor of the guitars mingles with that of the singer's delicate voice. How To Get out Of Love is held together only by the fragile thread of this voice. One can easily imagine it forming the soundtrack to a David Lynch film... Despite the great coherence of these twelve songs, each one possesses its own identity, and an inspiration that lends it its own integrity, its own place in the puzzle put together by Alice Phoebe Lou. Ultimately, it's a bewitching album that we never get tired of. Velvet Mood is one of the most beautiful tracks on this album. It makes you want to come back again and again to get lost in these songs, antidotes to the stresses of everyday. © Yan Céh/Qobuz