MY FAVOURITE
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In spring 2021, Raoul Vignal unveiled Years in Marble, his third album – also on Talitres – weaving a weightless universe of infinite delicacy. More hypnotic than ever, the Lyon-based musician’s melodies were both timeless and profoundly contemporary.
Raoul Vignal is often identified with his guitar playing (subtle arpeggios and finger-picking) and his vocals, which are imbued with a luminous melancholy. We sometimes forget to mention his talent for writing. Like the Impressionist painters, he captures and draws inspiration from the atmosphere of his everyday life. His nomadic compositions are as many stories, as many postcards.
Raoul Vignal’s new album Shadow Bands is set against the backdrop of his return to Lyon, the city of his birth, some ten years after he left it. Raoul Vignal wanders and rediscovers the streets of his childhood, the chestnut market on the Croix Rousse plateau (‘A Horse Named Fortune’), recalls his younger years, and observes the passage of time (‘Pathway’). He draws his inspiration from the short breaks he takes here and there: Berlin and the sad morning news of a war that broke out 1,000 km away (‘Canon Song’), Spain and a reunion with his brother (‘South, Brother’), Sète and an exchange with a friend on the road to deafness who describes the distant bellowing of the stag heard the week before (‘Deer Song’). Lyon as a home port, but the desire for somewhere else still pervades.
A new stroll through time (subtly accompanied on the drums by the rhythms of Lucien Chatin), on Shadow Bands we find again the simplicity and crystalline poetry that preciously penetrates us.